Why Everything You Read About Your Health Is Wrong
Marines And Sailors Training At Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii Wikimedia CommonsExcept when it's right. Unless you read both the right thing and the wrong thing. Or unless something's only half right. Existential crisis! There's a major problem in health journalism: It's wildly unreliable. As David H. Freedman points out in an excellent critique in the January/ February issue of Columbia Journalism Review, the rate of "overall wrongness" in top medical journals is as much as two thirds--something even the most seasoned science reporters don't point out. The resulting information conveyed to lay readers, is, at best, confusing and, at worst, dead wrong. In all areas of personal health, we see prominent media reports that directly oppose well-established knowledge in the field, or that make it sound as if scientifically unresolved questions have been resolved. The media, for instance, have variously supported and shot down the notion...