HealthNewsReview.org | Independent Expert Reviews of News Stories | Holding Health and Medical Journalism Accountable |
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- HealthNewsReview.org reviews news stories that make a therapeutic claim about:
- Specific treatments, tests, products or procedures (A story that includes multiple claims about multiple interventions or for multiple uses may not be eligible for review because our review criteria can generally only be applied to the review of a single, specific intervention for a single, specific condition.)
- So the stories may be about:
- Investigational drugs or devices
- Vitamins or nutritional supplements
- Diagnostic and screening tests
- Dietary recommendations
- Surgical procedures
Who conducts the reviews?
A multi-disciplinary team of reviewers from journalism, medicine, health services research and public health assesses the quality of the stories using a standardized rating system. Stories are graded and critiques are published on this website. In almost all cases, three different reviewers evaluate each story.
Read more about who we are.
Does Health News Review give medical advice?
HealthNewsReview.org does not provide medical opinion. Nothing in our reviews should be construed as medical advice.
Is HealthNewsReview.org fair to journalists?
We understand there are many challenges to achieving accuracy, balance and completeness in health care journalism. For a reporter, there are deadlines, editors, and corporate financial pressures. We hold the bar high for quality in health care journalism because it plays a major role in educating consumers. Consumers need to be well informed to make sound choices that affect their health and well being.
Which news organizations are reviewed?
News stories will be monitored each Monday through Friday in major U.S. media. We may, at any time, review any news story we see from any news organization. But on a regular basis, the following are the media we will review. We will only review what we find on the websites of these news organizations.
Each day we will review the websites of ten of the newspapers with the leading circulation. We excluded the New York Post and the New York Daily News because that would mean that three of the top 10 newspapers being reviewed were from New York. We wanted broader geographic diversity in what we reviewed.
- USA Today
- Wall Street Journal (health blog only since online is subscription only)
- NY Times
- LA Times
- Washington Post
- Chicago Tribune
- Houston Chronicle
- Arizona Republic
- Denver Post
- Dallas Morning News
Also checked daily:
National Public Radio health & science page
Reader's Digest.com health news page
MSNBC.com health news section
CNN.com health news section
WebMD health news section
Wire services: rotate daily, searching only one wire service per day
Associated Press health news
Reuters Health
HealthDay
Checked weekly: websites of news magazines Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report
NOTE:
During our first 3.5 years, we reviewed ABC, CBS and NBC health news stories every day. We are no longer going to go through the very time-consuming process of having three reviewers apply ten standardized criteria to TV news stories because, frankly, overall the stories were not improving. We have limited resources and can.t review everything. We hope to apply our time, resources and energy to new and different media with whom we might have more impact. That does not mean we are ignoring TV health news. We will still occasionally comment on our blog about things that we see,
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is considered the gold standard of preventive health recommendations - including on screening tests. It's a good source for journalists and consumers.
About 70% of the stories reviewed from 2006-9 failed to adequately discuss costs, or to explain how big (or small) are the potential benefits and harms of treatments, tests, products and procedures.
We have documented a disturbing trend of news stories taking an advocacy stance, promoting certain screening tests outside the boundaries of scientific evidence.
Stories on new technologies like Cyberknife, DaVinci robotic surgery systems, and proton beam cancer therapy often fail to scrutinize the evidence and/or to discuss the costs involved.
Rather than suggesting that everyone should be screened for everything, news stories could explain: "All screening tests cause harm; some may do good."
The first 38 network TV network morning health news stories reviewed in 2009 earned an average score of 1.2 stars. 13 of the 38 stories got ZERO stars.
Both TIME magazine and BusinessWeek have published terrific stories explaining the importance of the Number Needed to Treat - or NNT.
Knowing relative risk reduction is like knowing you have a 50% off coupon but not knowing whether it's for a Lexus or a lollipop. Absolute risk reduction tells you what the "coupon" is worth. Read more.
The website NoFreeLunch.org posts "a database of health care professionals who have pledged to accept no gifts from industry and to rely on non-promotional sources of information."
To help journalists cover stories responsibly, we post a list of independent experts who state that they do not have financial ties to drug or medical device manufacturers.
We apply the same ten standardized criteria to the review of every story.
We have about 30 story reviewers. Each story is reviewed by 3 different people.
Gary Schwitzer's seven words you shouldn't use in medical news: cure, miracle, breakthrough, promising, dramatic, hope, victim. Read why.
Our reviewers include two former CNN medical reporters and a former editor of the Washington Post health section.