Science News Review

Who’s Responsible for Irresponsible Science News?

Sep 19 at 7:07pm by Aileen

The New York Times published an article last weekend about how science news is reported, entitled Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy? It’s a lengthy examination of the sometimes sensationalist nature of press releases from research labs indicating that this or that supplement or dietary choice or treatment is supposed to cure what ails us, make us live healthier lives, and maybe even prevent the ravages of time and disease.

We’re all too familiar with how that so often turns out. The linkage that author Gary Taubes cites in the article is the infamous Hormone Replacement Therapy [HRT] doctors once recommended to all women of menopausal and post-menopausal age to prevent bone loss and heart disease. It was the magic cure-all against the consequences of getting old, and by 2001 at least 15 million women were filling HRT prescriptions annually.

Then, in 2002, estrogen therapy was exposed as a health hazard, leading to increased risk of heart disease, stroke, blood clots, breast cancer and maybe even dementia. Women stopped taking it and breast cancer rates plummeted. No one bothered to count how many women died early during the decades of the HRT ‘craze’. Could be tens of thousands.

So science blogger Matthew C. Nisbet of Framing Science wrote an opinion piece in reply to the Times article entitled At the NY Times Mag, is it really “bad science” or is it bad communication?

Nisbet complains about how the Times article uses call-outs such as “bad science,” “science vs. public health,” “the fllip-flop rhythm of science,” and “why we can’t trust science” rather than attempting to explain the sheer complexity of figuring out linkages between diet, drug therapies and human health issues. He seems very reluctant to admit that a large part of the problem in making unwarranted leaps of faith comes directly from the researchers who reported their findings with such excited framing in the first place.

Fact is, as Taubes reports in the Times, we’ve been treated to a lot of sensational science news over the years that turned out to be wrong, and the retractions are hardly ever given the same space on the front pages as the original reports. HRT doesn’t prevent heart disease. High fruit and vegetable diets don’t protect against heart disease either. A daily regimen of low-dose aspirin doesn’t prevent colorectal cancer or heart attacks in women under 65. Folic acid supplements don’t reduce the risk of colon cancer either - in fact, they appear to increase risk!

Nisbet wants to blame news organizations for the problems, as if they should be hiring independent epidemiologists on staff and have them conduct clinical trials to check out the sensational news releases actual science labs and epidemiologists send out daily making spurious claims. That’s ridiculous.

He does note that one of the problems in communication of uncertain science is that university researchers and journalists who write up those sensational news releases are all competing for prestige and future funding dollars. But why does this make the science editor at the NY Times or the Washington Post (et al.) responsible for the mistaken assignment of causation BY those researchers and college journalists?

Perhaps the best thing to do is what Taubes suggests - take it all with a large grain of salt, don’t believe everything you read about what science claims to know. Often they’ll be demonstrated wrong months or years down the road. That’s a shame, but it’s what we see on a regular basis. Nisbet is wrong to try and pin the blame anywhere but on the scientists hyping their extremely preliminary findings as done deals.

Perhaps part of the “Media Awareness” courses young teens are required to take in junior high these days (your basic “how to resist advertising”) should offer some basic rules of skepticism in the issue of evaluating science news. Heck, some skepticism about regular news - especially political news - couldn’t hurt either.

And advanced science education could use at least a semester’s worth of training in how NOT to find yourself on the wrong end of sensationalism about preliminary, untested findings. Maybe call it Reporting Research Results Realistically: 101.