The state of healthcare journalism, and science journalism in general, is abysmal. How we receive that news—usually through some form of social media—makes everything worse.
This week, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified processed meats as carcinogens and red meat as possibly carcinogenic. The nuances and complexities of this decision are lost when you scroll past a picture of bacon with a headline proclaiming that it causes cancer, or even worse, comparing it to smoking. This is only the most recent example of sensationalized health news; scroll back through your Facebook or Twitter feed and you’re sure to find an article with an outrageous headline such as, “Cheese has the Same Effect on Your Brain as Heroin.” No, it doesn’t. Certain components might work on similar neurological receptors or have similar biochemical mechanisms, but it clearly doesn’t have the same effect. If you’ve gone without cheese for a few days and weren’t in excruciating pain (accompanied by copious vomiting and diarrhea) then you clearly aren’t addicted to it the way heroin addicts are physiologically addicted to opiates.
Of course, those facts aren’t nearly as exciting or easy to explain as a salacious headline, but they do have the benefit of being accurate. Understanding science is not easy and it can be tedious. Let’s look at the WHO statement, for example. It said that eating 50 grams of processed meat every day is linked with an 18 percent increase in colorectal cancer. First off, it left out that this number is compared to people who have the lowest consumption of processed meats. When you are comparing things, it is important to know what you are actually comparing. Secondly, the 18 percent increase is effectively meaningless. To understand why, however, you first have to understand the difference between relative risk and absolute risk (trust me, I’ll try not to bore you too much).
An 18 percent increase of 1 is 1.18, while an 18 percent increase of 50 is 59. Both are a relative increase of 18 percent, but if you start out with a higher risk, then the absolute risk increase is higher (9 vs. 0.18, in this example). The absolute risk increase for processed meats is about 1 percent. So, knowing what the risk of developing colorectal cancer is in people who don’t eat processed meats is vital for understanding the impact of this statement.
The last paragraph I wrote is over one thousand characters, the length of eight tweets. It’s also much less interesting than overblown claims about how bacon is killing you. Scroll through your Facebook or Twitter feed for a minute and count how many status updates are articles—on Facebook, I counted 8 news articles about sports, politics, cooking, health and TV. There were also a few pictures of celebrity quotes that probably weren’t actually something the celebrity said (as John Oliver points out).
Social media constantly bombards us with information and “news;” Facebook’s trending section deliberately mimics the appearance of feed from a news website. Even if we’re committed to understanding a complicated subject, it is impossible to read everything, let alone read related articles and evaluate all of the evidence. And everything about our interaction with social media encourages us to value immediacy and sensationalism over nuance and substance. We want to find the important and interesting articles, but because there is so much content to absorb, we only really see the ones that have unexpected or outrageous headlines (like the cheese article). The validity of these studies doesn’t matter as long as they entertain us, which is the purpose of social media.
It’s not easy to compress complicated scientific research into 140 characters or to create interesting and truthful headlines, but it can be done. Healthcare Triage is a YouTube channel that provides health and science information without compromising standards; it offers thorough explanations of the literature about a range of topics. The host, Dr. Aaron Carroll, manages to do this by offering clear explanations rather than sensationalism or jargon and by employing appealing animation and graphics.
As the recent statement by WHO suggests, physicians and scientists need to do a better job explaining their research. As well, journalists should make more of an effort to accurately reflect the claims being made by scientists. Until we reach this information utopia, however, you can take a few easy steps to verify what you are reading. First, use multiple sources to get a more complete picture of the issue. Second, rely on sites such as Healthcare Triage or the Mayo Clinic’s website—really, anything where actual scientists are talking about science.
And finally, take the articles you see on your Facebook or Twitter feed with a grain of salt (just as you should the headline of this one). But be careful. I bet salt causes cancer too.
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