1. Provide the title of your story or series and the names of the journalists involved.
"Convincing the Public to Accept New Medical Guidelines: When it comes to new treatment guidelines for breast cancer, back pain and other maladies, it's the narrative presentation that matters" by Christie Aschwanden
2. List date(s) this work was published or aired.
April 2010 in Miller-McCune magazine.
3. Provide a brief synopsis of the story or stories, including any significant findings.
This story examines backlash against evidence-based medicine and argues that the facts alone will never change entrenched practices and in some cases efforts to debunk erroneous beliefs about health interventions may actually serve to strengthen them. For evidence-based reforms to succeed, they must be presented in a narrative that resonates with the existing belief systems of patients, doctors, and health policy makers. Or, to borrow a phrase from politics, it's not the evidence, stupid — it's the story.
4. Explain types of documents, data or Internet resources used. Were FOI or public records act requests required? How did this affect the work?
I didn't use FOI, but I spent many hours doing literature searches on PubMed.
5. Explain types of human sources used.
I conducted dozens of interviews for this story. Most of this background material did not make it into the piece, but it informed the story. I did all of this research on my own. Reporting I'd done for stories I'd previously written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Health magazine laid the groundwork this piece.
6. Results (if any).
Since this story has run, I've learned that it is being used in the curricula of programs in physical therapy, medicine and physician assistant training. I can't prove any cause and effect, but I noticed that the Susan G Komen for the Cure foundation has changed the information on their website about mammography since my conversation with their CEO that I describe in the piece.
7. Follow-up (if any). Have you run a correction or clarification on the report or has anyone come forward to challenge its accuracy? If so, please explain.
No.
8. Advice to other journalists planning a similar story or project.
This piece arose from observations that I made over the course of several years while writing about disparate subjects. It came together in part because I've had a long standing interest in both evidence-based medicine and belief. I kept seeing these two interests intersect, and that's how I came upon the story. I think this is a testament to the importance of developing specific areas of interest that you follow so that you can look for patterns and see the big picture. It would have been hard to develop this story if I hadn't spent so much time over the years following the rise of EBM and covering topics like mammography. I first wrote about the mammography controversy in 2000, and this story arose in part from my observation that the public narrative about mammograms had hardly changed since then, even though researchers' understanding of the science had evolved considerably.