Nortin Hadler, a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, adds another item to our list of university-sponsored bullshit.
…[W]e are … bombarded by announcements and pronouncements from medical centers… Many tout the opening of a new building, or the offering of a new procedure, or claim world class expertise that outshines all others. These announcements and pronouncements are the work product of a formal department in the institution that often bears the moniker “Public Affairs” or even the “Public Affairs and Marketing Office” as is the case for my own [University of North Carolina] Hospitals. The departmental budget is often liberal and always part of the “overhead” of health care in our country. We all pay for these activities as part of our health care premiums.
Staffing these departments are people highly skilled in communicating to the public with backgrounds in marketing, public relations or, increasingly, health journalism. Working in institutional “health communications” is all too often the soft landing for unemployed health journalists. Hence, the pronouncements and announcements are often put forth in the glossiest of multimedia formats as well as the more standard press announcements.
A recent analysis of the press releases by academic medical centers casts all this activity in an unflattering light (Annals of Internal Medicine 2009;150:613-8). This analysis was a demanding exercise undertaken by investigators funded by the National Cancer Institute. Academic medical centers issue an average of nearly 50 press releases annually. Nearly half pertain to research in animals, which are almost always cast as relevant to human health.
Of the releases about primary human research, very few were describing studies that would pass muster as high quality; far more described findings that were preliminary at best. Most neglected to emphasize cautions regarding interpreting such studies. Clearly, academic medical centers are wont to promote research that has uncertain relevance to human health.
… At the very least, media must state whether the reportage is based on primary sources that take personal responsibility for the validity of the pronouncement. Better yet, independent sources should be queried as to the validity, reproducibility and relevance of the claims…
If the pronouncement is simply lifted from a marketing Web site, that should be disclosed….