How patients are harmed by misleading media messages
No journalist – and certainly no health care journalist – rolls out of bed in the morning and thinks, “How can I go in to work today and screw up and hurt people?” But the harm from misleading media messages about health care – unintentional though it may be – is still very real.
In our podcast series on HealthNewsReview.org, we’ve started to provide a forum for smart patients and patient advocates to tell their own stories about the harm that can occur from inaccurate, imbalanced or incomplete health care media messages.
The sister-in-law of a man with glioblastoma (brain cancer) told how he was jerked around on a roller coaster ride of emotion – first being told of a “breakthrough” drug but then learning that it hadn’t even been tested in humans. It was all because of a shoddy PR news release.
The founder of a rare disease foundation – for primary ciliary dyskinesia – directed her anger at a medical journal, which published an article headline that spread excitement through the patient community – unwarranted excitement in her eyes. She had to temper peoples’ enthusiasm because of what the journal headline – and some subsequent media coverage - did not reveal.
And a woman who has had migraines for 50 years – and who is now a migraine patient advocate and educator – was “pissed off” as she says – by misleading TV news that spread across the country about a “new migraine treatment.”
We’re trying to put a human face and voice to these harms. Each of these episodes involved a relatively simple misstatement or communications glitch that could have been easily prevented, fixed or overcome.
We who write news releases and news stories about health care should keep real people like these folks in mind before we hit “send” or “publish.” If we don’t, we may hurt more people than we help – mislead more than we inform.
(All of our podcasts are archived here. We’ve done profiles of standout health care journalists Christie Aschwanden and John Fauber, and featured interviews with leading researchers such as Drs. Otis Brawley, Laura Esserman and John Ioannidis.)
[Photo by Patrick Breitenbach via Flickr.]