about media doctor

The goal of Media Doctor Canada is to improve Canadian media coverage of new medical drugs and treatments. The Media Doctor Canada team reviews current news stories about medical drugs and treatments, and assesses the stories' quality using a standardised rating scale. Using a five star system, we evaluate stories based on how well they do, providing the important information you need to make an informed decision about the drug or treatment being reported on.

Specific Objectives

• Ensure that, when possible, all important information associated with new treatments are reported, including benefits, harms, costs, adverse effects, availability, and conflict of interest.
• Establish the interest and usefulness in providing alerts to GPs on media coverage of new treatments.
• Establish a website called Media Doctor to provide feedback to journalists about the quality of their news stories.
• Evaluate the impact of Media Doctor on the quality of reports on new medical treatments in the lay press using time series analysis of serial scores achieved by individual media outlets.
• To investigate the international potential for such a process, especially in developing countries.

First Line of Information

The lay press plays a crucial role in the communicating health messages and notifying the public about research findings and new treatments. Members of the public often base their opinions on what they have read or heard in the press, and subsequently, press cuttings are presented to doctors and become the basis of discussions about treatment decisions. Doctors themselves may hear first about developments through the lay press (1,2,3,4,5).

A GP Tool

A secondary aim is for Media Doctor to act as a GP service in providing email alerts to relevant, current media articles that patients may approach them about. We believe the impact on the media would be far greater when applied in developing countries.

Current Reporting Practices

In general, the coverage of new medical treatments in the lay press is regarded as poor and is prone to exaggeration of facts in order to create unnecessary sensationalism (1,3,4,5). Promoters of new therapies employ professional public relations companies to prepare press releases that over-emphasise the benefits and minimise the potential harms of new products. These press releases often form the basis for stories in the lay press and are sometimes used directly without attribution. Advocates for treatments use the media to create pressure from the community to have them approved and funded and often do not take account of data on comparative efficacy and cost effectiveness. Examples of this include the opiate antagonist naltrexone and sildenafl for erectile dysfunction (6).

There is evidence in other professional areas that timely feedback on performance can improve practice standards (7). Therefore, audits of quality in health reporting in the lay press and feedback of these may improve the informative value of media stories.

In many countries, direct to consumer advertising activities are a large and very important part of the marketing strategy of the pharmaceutical industry (8,9). In developing countries, there is limited government control of advertising content and comparatively low levels of journalistic training. There is evidence that the activities of drug companies are less well controlled in developing countries and therefore these is a greater potential for the media to be used inappropriately to influence public knowledge.

Outcomes and Significance

The main outcome will be an objective evaluation of the quality of current health reporting in the lay press and a mechanism by which to inform journalists and media organisations on the quality of their stories with the view to improvement.

With increasing pressure on healthcare funding, it is important that the lay press adopts a neutral position on the value of new expensive medical treatments, and is able to provide accurate and unbiased information to the public. It is hoped this site will have a positive influence on journalists, their editors and executive producers, and that it may change the internal culture of the media organisation.

A major and sustained improvement in reporting standards will probably require changes to the culture of media companies, improved education of young journalists, and a change in the behaviour of drug companies and researchers. What we have outlined here is a 'minimal' intervention, but if it works it will be sustainable and cost-effective and could be used to educate the industry, health professionals and the public.

Developing Media Doctor will assess the impact of the system on the western media. However we feel this impact could be even greater if applied in developing countries. Increasingly news in developing countries is available online, making it easier to retrieve medical news stories. The Media Doctor team is interested in working with partners to extend the appraisal of medical news stories to other countries.

References

1. Entwistle V.
   Reporting Research in Medical Journals and Newspapers
   BMJ 1995;310:920 3
2. Phillips DP, Kanter EJ, Bednarczyk B, Tastad PL.
   Importance of The Lay Press in the Transmission of Medical Knowledge to the Scientific Community
   N Eng J Med 1991;325:1180 3
3. Johnson T. Shattuck
   Lecture Medicine and the Media
   N Eng J Med 1998;339:87 92
4. Nelkin D.
   An Uneasy Relationship: the Tensions Between Medicine and the Media
   Lancet 1996;347:1600 3.
5. Moynihan R, Bero L, Ross Degnan D, Henry D, Lee K, Watkins J, Mah C, Soumerai SB.
   Coverage by the News Media of the Benefits and Harms of Medications
   N Eng J Med. 2000; 342:1645-1650
6. Wilkinson M.
   Naltrexone and Viagra Launch Challenge
   Sydney Morning Herald 13th Dec 1999
7. Thomson O'Brien MA, .Oxman AD, Davis DA, Haynes RB, Freemantle N, Harvey EL.
   Audit and Feedback: Effects on Professional Practice and Health Care Outcomes (Cochrane Review)
   In: The Cochrane Library, Issue 4, 1999. Oxford: Update Software:
8. Angell M, Kassirer J.
   Clinical Research What Should the Public Believe?
   N Eng J Med 1994;331:189¬190
9. Moynihan R, Heath I, Henry D.
   Selling Sickness: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Disease Mongering
   BMJ 2002;324:886-891
10. McGettigan P, Sly K, Hill S, O'Connell D, Henry D.
    The Effect of Information Framing on the Practices of Physicians
    Journal of General Internal Medicine 1999;14:633 642