Gary Schwitzer, Publisher of HealthNewsReview.org
The other day my reading of Three common mistakes in medical journalism brought me to the original blog article How the News Media May Hurt – Not Help – Health Literacy Efforts. The author Gary Schwitzer discusses nicely three issues of data presentation in public media that may lead to distortion of interpretation of the findings from medical research.
- Absolute versus relative risk/benefit data
- Association does not equal causation
- How we discuss screening tests
This is a good reminder of how to present our data and draw conclusions from the analysis fairly in scientific publications.