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News Headlines! True or False?
You would hope that newspaper companies like the large Gannett Newspaper chain, whose newspapers reach countless millions of readers, would make sure that their reporting is responsible, especially with regard to health issues that impact people’s lives. Unfortunately, I do not find that to be the case.
What I find, instead, is sensationalist reporting with no regard to the damage it can do to the health of so many unsuspecting readers.
Here are examples of two articles written two weeks apart, that received big play in the The Arizona Republic, a Gannett newspaper, which, I’m sure, given the by-lines, was published in Gannett newspapers around the country. Gannett is the publisher of the widely distributed USA Today for those of you who don’t know.
The first article had the blazingly bold headline – Study can find no benefit in acupuncture for fibromyalgia. By Ron Todt, Associated Press
I quote from the first paragraph. “Philadelphia --- Acupuncture proved no more effective than sham treatments for treating pain from a common chronic condition, according to a new study.”
The story goes on and on telling how the study was run and reports that it was published in the July 5th Tuesday issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. “We did not find that acupuncture reduced pain in patients with fibromyalgia,” the study concluded.
Researcher Dedra Buchwald said the results were a surprise, given stories and testimonials from fibromyalgia patients who say acupuncture helps. Then she says, in the very last paragraph of this good sized article, that acupuncturists generally tailor treatments for each patient and combine it with other forms of treatment, which cannot be done in a clinical
trial!
Is it a wonder then that patients given acupuncture treatments, combined with other treatments that were specifically tailored to them, benefited from these treatments and that those in Buchwald’s trial, with all test subjects given the limited treatment, did not?
If Buchwald admits that acupuncture is always combined with other treatments and needs to be tailored to the patient, why would she run a trial using acupuncture alone which is obviously designed to fail from the start?
Why didn’t she talk to acupuncturists about how to properly structure the test? Why didn’t she include a group of patients who were treated with treatments specifically designed for them as is the normal practice to be combined with acupuncture? Why did she structure a trial that was doomed to failure from the start? Was it because she wanted the trial to fail?
The Chinese have thousands of years of experience practicing acupuncture and along comes someone who obviously knows little or nothing about the practice of acupuncture and has the gall to report that fibromyalgia patients can get no benefit from acupuncture treatments! What about all those fibromyalgia patients who say they did benefit? Are they all liars?
The trouble with this kind of reporting is that most people are impressed with headlines and only skim the article and wind up believing the “conclusions” given in the opening paragraph.
Example number two: The byline for this one is Carla McClain, Arizona Daily Star and the headline screams –
Drinking too much water can kill you!
The article begins with, and I quote, “Sometime in the middle of the night, Carol Tufts began to feel very strange. Dizzy, confused, disoriented. By midmorning, she had collapsed into a chair, unable to walk, unaware of what day it was. She was, in fact, dying.
The reason --- she drank too much water. Too much water? In the southern Arizona desert where the never-ending mantra drummed into our heads tells us to drink water constantly to ward off the perils of our dry heat? Well, Tufts followed that advice for years, drinking lots of water daily to stay hydrated and healthy, and it almost killed her.”
The story goes on and on in the same vein, column after column, citing a marathon runner who dropped dead from drinking too much water and other such cases.
It took three columns to finally get to the real cause of the problem -- low sodium, not too much water. Yes, when your body loses water, you also lose salt (sodium) and if you only replace the water and not the salt, and your sodium level gets low enough, you can die.
Ever hear of heat prostration? Cause? Low sodium level from being exposed to high heat too long. Quick cure? A couple of tablespoons of salt. I know, it happened to me.
Back to the marathon runner. It’s hard to believe that a marathon runner would not take salt tablets when racing in the heat or drink water that contains electrolytes.
Medication, by the way, especially in older people, can also exacerbate sodium loss.
So, does drinking too much water kill you as the headline screams? I don’t think so. It’s not taking sodium to maintain your sodium level that will kill you, not the water.
There’s no excitement in putting the real reason up front in a headline. But there is plenty of shock value and excitement in reading that drinking water can kill you.
Trouble is, that here again, many people only read headlines or just skim through an article, especially a long one, and will come away with information that is a total or partial lie that can do harm to their health, sometimes fatally.
The moral is --- when you see an article on health, read it thoroughly and carefully and if it doesn’t make good sense, do some further checking and at least skip to the last paragraphs where important data often shows up. Newspaper reporters, unfortunately, are selling newspapers and all too often write for shock value and not your good health.
And another thing, always question statistics. Do not take statistics at face value. Make sure that the basis is sound and not designed to give the answer the researcher is looking for, regardless of the facts, as in the first article above where so many people are benefiting from acupuncture treatments and the test is proving them wrong!
My wife and I live in a hot dry climate and salt our food tastefully and we can stay out in the sun for long period of time without any problems. We use the all natural sea salt which is full of minerals and not that processed white stuff, except if we are not home.
To your good health and longevity,
Ira Marxe
CEO, Good Health Supplement
Copyrighted © 2005 - All Rights Reserved
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