Sensational News Stories Raise Patient Expectations
Sensational News Stories Raise Patient Expectations
Hello, I'm Dr. Gerald Chodak for Medscape. In searching for this week's topic, I typed the words "prostate news" into my Web browser and up popped 6 recent articles that said, "New study shows promise for detecting prostate cancer."
A press release came out of a meeting that took place in Chicago that discussed a treatment called contrast-enhanced ultrasound. Essentially, it involves injecting microbubbles into a vein and using that to indentify vascular areas in the prostate as potential areas for doing a biopsy.
The press release revealed very little information other than the sensationalized headline. I contacted the doctor who presented his work and found out that this information was literally based on only 4 patients. They are funded to test up to 100 patients. The study involved doing an analysis of men who were going to have a radical prostatectomy by first performing this contrast-enhanced ultrasound prior to the radical prostatectomy. The ultrasound findings were then correlated with the pathologic findings, looking for areas that show cancer or don't show cancer.
Obviously, anything that can enhance our ability to tell where prostate cancer is located would certainly be of great help. Maybe it might even become helpful one day if we got better at determining whether focal therapies are worthwhile for this disease. But the real point of addressing this has to do with the way the media presents information to the public. I have no doubt that some patients around the United States, and probably around the world, will likely visit their doctor to ask more about this test, with the impression that it's the next greatest thing that they should undergo.
The problem here is that the media doesn't do its job of really investigating the information that they present. They don't do a critical analysis to make the public aware of what's good, what's bad, what the strengths are, and what the weaknesses are. Most important, where is it on the scheme of research? I doubt that we will see a report followed up in a few years saying that this treatment turned out not to be worthwhile.
We get all the sensational news headlines, but we don't get much analysis, we don't get much critique, and I think that's a real problem. The question, of course, is: Why does that happen? Are we so hungry for news headlines and sensational information that these types of articles will be read and embraced? Maybe it's just a way of driving more publicity and more marketing and advertising. I'm not really sure. All I know is that over and over again, the media continues to misrepresent information, usually presenting it very prematurely before knowing whether it's really good for patients or not. This needs to be changed. I don't have very good solutions for it, and I certainly welcome your comments about whether you think this is a problem that should be addressed. Thank you for watching.
Hello, I'm Dr. Gerald Chodak for Medscape. In searching for this week's topic, I typed the words "prostate news" into my Web browser and up popped 6 recent articles that said, "New study shows promise for detecting prostate cancer."
A press release came out of a meeting that took place in Chicago that discussed a treatment called contrast-enhanced ultrasound. Essentially, it involves injecting microbubbles into a vein and using that to indentify vascular areas in the prostate as potential areas for doing a biopsy.
The press release revealed very little information other than the sensationalized headline. I contacted the doctor who presented his work and found out that this information was literally based on only 4 patients. They are funded to test up to 100 patients. The study involved doing an analysis of men who were going to have a radical prostatectomy by first performing this contrast-enhanced ultrasound prior to the radical prostatectomy. The ultrasound findings were then correlated with the pathologic findings, looking for areas that show cancer or don't show cancer.
Obviously, anything that can enhance our ability to tell where prostate cancer is located would certainly be of great help. Maybe it might even become helpful one day if we got better at determining whether focal therapies are worthwhile for this disease. But the real point of addressing this has to do with the way the media presents information to the public. I have no doubt that some patients around the United States, and probably around the world, will likely visit their doctor to ask more about this test, with the impression that it's the next greatest thing that they should undergo.
The problem here is that the media doesn't do its job of really investigating the information that they present. They don't do a critical analysis to make the public aware of what's good, what's bad, what the strengths are, and what the weaknesses are. Most important, where is it on the scheme of research? I doubt that we will see a report followed up in a few years saying that this treatment turned out not to be worthwhile.
We get all the sensational news headlines, but we don't get much analysis, we don't get much critique, and I think that's a real problem. The question, of course, is: Why does that happen? Are we so hungry for news headlines and sensational information that these types of articles will be read and embraced? Maybe it's just a way of driving more publicity and more marketing and advertising. I'm not really sure. All I know is that over and over again, the media continues to misrepresent information, usually presenting it very prematurely before knowing whether it's really good for patients or not. This needs to be changed. I don't have very good solutions for it, and I certainly welcome your comments about whether you think this is a problem that should be addressed. Thank you for watching.
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