How Money Affects Results in Breast Cancer Studies

Breast cancer studies funded by pharmaceutical companies are more likely to report positive, or beneficial, results than those funded by government or non-profit organizations, according to a new report in the Journal Cancer. That doesn't necessarily mean that the results are wrong, as Amanda Gardner points out in the Washington Post. You would expect drug companies to have a better track record

More on Vitamins and Pregnancy

One of the hardest parts about writing health stories is figuring out what to leave out. Last Friday I wrote a post that focused on prenatal vitamins and the risk of pediatric cancer. Although the vitamins reduced the risk of some cancers by 50 percent, I calculated that that was not a huge change because the absolute risk of getting cancer in childhood is so low."But isn't taking vitamins during

Vitamins Reduce Cancer Risk--Relatively Speaking

A new study shows that women who take multivitamins and folic acid during pregnancy reduce the chance that their baby will develop some childhood cancers by almost 50%. Your first question on reading this should be "50% of what?"In other words, you want to know what the absolute risk of developing pediatric cancer is. Then you can figure out whether a 50% reduction (the so-called relative risk)

Treating Herpes May Prevent HIV Transmission

Everyone takes shortcuts--even medical researchers. That's not necessarily a bad thing. After all, where would we be if Christopher Columbus hadn't decided to take a shortcut to Asia? Hmm, maybe that's not the best example.The point is that the best health-and-science journalists, like Alice Chang of the Associated Press, tell you right away when scientists are taking shortcuts.Chang reported on

Premature Babies and Happy Endings

Readers sometimes wonder whether journalists allow their politics or their advertisers to influence how the news is covered. But I've noticed a different bias over the years in coverage about extremely premature infants. Call it the bias in favor of a happy ending.Take, for example, the opening sentences from Monday's article by Erika Beras in the Miami Herald under the headline "Miracle Baby

Women and Heart Disease

You've got to understand risk if you want to stay healthy. Why do women fear breast cancer more than heart disease? As a group, women have a 4% chance of dying from breast cancer vs. a 38% chance of dying from heart disease. But because women are less likely than men to develop heart disease in their 40s, they (and their doctors) often assume they don't need to worry too much about cardiac

Autism Gene Is Found--Or Is It?

Headlines are often major sources of error. The Canadian Press just ran a story under the banner "Autism Gene Found." Trouble is, if you read the CP story, or the scientific study in Nature Genetics on which it was based, it's clear that no single gene--or even collection of genes--for autism has been found. Instead, researchers scanned genetic samples from 1,400 carefully selected families with

Welcome!

We learn a lot about our health from the media--books, magazines, television, radio and the Internet. But you can't always trust everything you read, hear or see. I should know. I've written about health and medicine for more than 20 years--mostly at TIME magazine. This blog is aimed at evaluating health stories in the media, identifying the good, the bad and the ugly and helping you to be a