Tag Archives: cancer screening

Webinar to explore cancer reporting without hype
and with the right measure of hope

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Elaine Schattner, M.D., left, and Mehra Golshan, M.D., right, will speak at an upcoming AHCJ Webinar.

The breast cancer draft screening recommendations released by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force in May have generated controversy and confusion, making it crucial for health journalists to provide balanced information without inadvertently creating false hope or unnecessary fear.

Cancer screening has always involved risks alongside benefits — unnecessary procedures generated from false positives remain a potential harm. But greater public awareness about screening guidelines and cancer symptoms, paired with greater willingness to talk more openly about cancer than in the past, have meant more disease is caught today at earlier stages than it once was. This makes it more treatable and increases odds of survival. 

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Liz Seegert (@lseegert) is AHCJ’s topic leader on aging. Her work has appeared in NextAvenue.com, Journal of Active Aging, Cancer Today and other outlets. Tara Haelle (@TaraHaelle) is medical studies core topic leader, helping journalists translate evidence into accurate information.

Adjusted risk pool has some rethinking cervical cancer rates

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What if experts wanted to figure out the rate of tonsil cancer, but forgot to exclude all the people who’d had their tonsils removed?

Those people are no longer at risk for tonsil cancer, and since there are more than half a million tonsillectomies performed each year in the U.S., counting them in the risk pool would dramatically dilute the true rate of the disease.

That’s what seems to have happened with cervical cancer, according to a thought-provoking new study published in the journal Cancer.

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Brenda Goodman (@ReporterGoodman) has been a reporter for 15 years, covering health, science, and medicine for television, magazines, newspapers and the Web. She was senior news writer for WebMD before joining CNN Health. Her stories have appeared in Scientific American, The New York Times, Psychology Today, Parade, Self, Health, and The Boston Globe, among others.

Navratilova, GMA uncritically push screening

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In February, Martina Navratilova was diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ, the most common form of breast cancer. She has since had a lumpectomy and says she’s doing well and doesn’t expect the cancer to return. But in an interview with Good Morning America during which she announced her diagnosis and surgery, the tennis star stepped beyond the world of sport and into the world of medicine. And there she made the sort of missteps she’s known for avoiding on the court.

“The reason I wanted to speak about this is to encourage these woman to have mammograms,” (Navratilova) said. “I just want to encourage women to have that yearly check-up.”
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Navratilova said she doesn’t agree with recent recommendations that women between the ages of 40 and 49 should not necessarily get regular breast cancer screenings.

“The cancer knows that you’re not 50 yet?” she said. “I can’t speak for the doctors, but in my personal case I’m so glad that I did it.”

In her blog “A Healthy Piece of My Mind,” writer and PR rep Eve Harris pointed out the fallacies lurking in the tennis star’s screening recommendations, beyond the obvious age-related concerns.

First, Harris said, Navratilova exhorts women to scrape together the money to pay for screenings, yet doesn’t mention the many programs available to help uninsured and underinsured women pay for mammograms.

Second, Navratilova claims that she was lucky, and would have been in serious trouble had she not detected the cancer when she did. In fact, Harris writes, there is not enough information about the natural progression of such cancers to make that declaration.

GMA correspondent Robin Roberts, who also has battled breast cancer, failed to point out any of that and, in fact, offered a very simplified interpretation of what the new breast cancer screening recommendations say.

(Hat tip to @lauranewmanny)

Andrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Rounding up some of the latest health coverage

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With good topics for the blog flooding in and a short holiday week to get them all posted, I’m taking a shortcut to point you toward some interesting stories:

ProPublica: What Health Care Reform Means for the underinsured

Rapidly rising premiums have forced them to increase their deductible every year, and now they have a policy with a $5,000 deductible per illness per year.

Steve Lopez in the Los Angeles Times: A doctor is flummoxed by the costs when he becomes the patient

As a physician, he’s well aware that emergency room treatment is very expensive. But knowing the true cost of the limited supplies and labor required to treat such a minor wound, he found the experience more than a little disturbing.

Trevor Butterworth in Forbes.com: Why mall Santas do need the H1N1 vaccine, featuring AHCJ board member Maryn McKenna’s take on how well the media has covered H1N1.

McKenna gives the media a “gentleman’s C” for its coverage of swine flu, but believes it has been getting better in the past few months.

AHCJ member Elaine Schattner, M.D., in the Huffington Post: Mammography: A Not-So-Fatalistic View

I’m a medical oncologist and breast cancer survivor who holds a highly informed and intensely personal perspective on the subject. In my view, the press is getting and giving the wrong message on mammography. There are significant flaws in recent analyses that have escaped most headlines.

Pia Christensen (@AHCJ_Pia) is the managing editor/online services for AHCJ. She manages the content and development of healthjournalism.org, coordinates AHCJ's social media efforts and edits and manages production of association guides, programs and newsletters.

Times crafts strong reminder of screening’s dangers

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Sarah-Kate Templeton, in The Times of London, tells the story of one victim of medical screening and overtreatment, wrapping that story in the larger debate about unnecessary medical screening and finally caps it all off with the news of a “Making Sense of Screening” guide, produced for the charity Sense About Science by a group of British scientists and doctors.

Templeton’s story provides a forceful reminder of the dangers of some early screening and aggressive treatment, all in the words of a 56-year-old math teacher who was diagnosed with a dormant form of breast cancer, and whose doctors recommended radical treatment.

The National Health Service has had to rewrite its advice to include warnings about potential harm caused by the screening process “after research showed that thousands of women have been misled into having unnecessary surgery.”

(Hat tip to Gary Schwitzer)

Andrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.