Cleveland Clinic did what all health systems do in mid-December: send out news-you-can-use, 2012 predictions about better health in the coming year. This one included top medical tests people should get in 2012.
Unfortunately, one of the leading media watchdogs on health news treated the tips like a bad infection. And now the release — which I couldn’t find on the Cleveland Clinic’s website — has become a symbol for a hot-button topic among medical professionals and media types: poor and cheesy medical information.
Gary Schwitzer of HealthNewsReview.org took aim on Dec. 19 at the Cleveland Clinic’s news tips. That critique has popped up across health sites since then and most recently on Dr. Val Jones’ GetterBetterHealth.com.
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Schwitzer’s site usually targets news media outlets and is dedicated to improving the accuracy of news stories about medical information with the goal of “helping consumers evaluate the evidence for and against new ideas in healthcare.” Its criteria: accuracy, balance and completeness.
Schwitzer’s takedown of the release was merciless, particularly around the tests for men. He quoted the lists and offered his critique afterward (in red).
- “High-sensitive C-reactive protein — High levels of this inflammatory biomarker are predictive for future heart problems.” But the US Preventive Services Task Force, by comparison, states that “the evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of using high-sensitivity C-reactive protein to screen asymptomatic men and women with no history of coronary heart disease.”
- “Vitamin D level — Low levels are associated with osteopenia, osteoporosis, breast cancer, colon cancer and heart disease.” But the Endocrine Society, by comparison, published a guideline recommending that doctors “screen for vitamin D deficiency in people at risk for deficiency, including obese individuals, blacks, pregnant and lactating women, and patients with malabsorption syndromes. “We do not recommend population screening for vitamin D deficiency in individuals who are not at risk,” the Society’s task force chair said.
- “PSA level — To screen for prostate cancer.” Do we really need to go through this again? The US Preventive Services Task Force doesn’t make that recommendation. The American Cancer Society doesn’t. This kind of blanket recommendation for men of all ages to be screened for prostate cancer does not reflect the growing call for fully informed, shared decision-making to take place regarding PSA testing.
Schwitzer goes on to take on the women’s side of the health tips, in particular: “Women do not have to have the PSA test, but they should have a routine breast exam and pap smear.”
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But, by comparison, the USPSTF states that “the current evidence is insufficient to assess the additional benefits and harms of clinical breast examination beyond screening mammography in women 40 years or older” and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center states that clinical breast exam “adds little to mammography in reducing breast cancer deaths.”
He ends the entry by saying: “We’re going to see a lot of these ‘what to do in the New Year’ health tips columns. We hope more of them are more evidence-based than this one was. And we hope that journalists don’t act on these news tips without doing their own homework on the state of the evidence.”
Cleveland Clinic didn’t respond for a request for comment.
Health systems are going to be getting more of this scrutiny, which is typically reserved for journalists or academic journals. Cleveland Clinic’s media relations section actually takes you to a section called the Cleveland Clinic Newsroom. That’s a completely appropriate title, by the way, in an era where hospitals are even more trusted than journalistic enterprises like WebMD.
