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medpundit |
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Thursday, March 28, 2002God knows, I’m suspicious of biomedical companies and their financial ties with researchers, but there are a few disconcerting things about the Seattle Times story. It has all the hallmarks of bad medical reporting. The founders of the biomedical company are portrayed as flim-flam artists, the patients who died are portrayed in a way that can’t fail to tug your heart strings, and the doctors, with the exception of a whistle blower, are portrayed as greedy. The reporter repeats over and over the claim that the people who enrolled in the trial would have lived longer if they never entered the study. That may be true in retrospect, but people with that type of cancer at that point in history, had a 70% five year mortality rate (click here for statistics). Isn’t it just possible that facing that sort of prognosis they chose to take a chance on an experimental therapy? The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Landro makes a good point about family members’ ability to interpret their loved ones’ understanding of informed consent. No one but the person signing those papers can know that. Deciding to participate in a clinical trial is an emotionally laden decision. Clinical trials give hope to patients who have none. Far too often, those hopes are dashed, but the patients enter the studies knowing they are taking that risk. The families can be forgiven for their bitter disappointment in that shattered hope. What can not be forgiven is the newspaper’s manipulation of that disappointment in pursuit of a story. They are obviously very proud of their work and what it has wrought. They even have a special web page devoted to it. What I found eye-opening is that when submitting stories for the Pulitzer, newspapers also have to submit letters to the editor that dispute the story. That explains why so few newspapers print letters that disagree with their stories. And all this time I just thought it was out and out bias. posted by Sydney on 3/28/2002 08:13:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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