How Should Journalists Cover Basic Medical Research?

jordan, I like this story. It's good stuff.

I think part of the problem is the general level of ignorance that people have about the science involved.  I have friends who are agrochemists and pharmacists - to hear them talking 'shop' with colleagues, they might as well be speaking a foreign language - and I've got a fairly good general grasp of science!

All people want to hear is "science can cure this."  Even when you go to the doctors, the last thing you want to hear is "change your diet, do some exercise and here's a list of side-effects."  We just want the tablet that fixes the problem instantly.

I don't think the problem is limited to medical journalism.  Look at any job that requires a masters degree to work in and journalists will have a hell of a job selling that to the general public, simply because we're not all engineers, surgeons, economists, diplomats, etc.  For instance, how many people know what the Large Hadron Collider is actually for, compared to the millions that have seen a headline about it creating black-holes?

The bigger problem with reporting medicine is that it quite literally deals with life and death.   It's almost easier to write a good headline for that sort of thing.  Example: the jab that would immunise women against cervical cancer (HPV, the human papillomavirus vaccine).  In the UK, the story isn't about protecting people from cancer, the story is about having to explain sex to 12/13-year-old girls.  The real story is about how up-tight the British are and this noise is drowning-out the potential life-saving benefits of the drug.  All because sex sells more newspapers than cancer.

If anything, the journalist's role should be to manage expectations.  Yes, here's a great new drug, but it's only got a 10% success rate.

The problem there is that, when it comes to life and death, everybody forgets how statistics work and thinks that they'll be that 1-in-10.