“Talk to your doctor”–A reporter’s copout?
Kathleen Doheny of HealthDay reports this morning, in a story on the US News website, that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said American women should ”keep doing what you’ve been doing for years — talk to your doctor about your individual history, ask questions, and make the decision that is right for you.”
In an item Wednesday on Katie Couric‘s Notebook, the CBS evening news anchor says “when it comes to your health, making an informed decision in consultation with your doctor is the wisest thing you can do.”
A blog item on The Baltimore Sun site by Kelly Brewington says, “So, now what? Talk to your doctor, says the panel,” a reference to the government panel that issued the new guidelines.
This is something many of us have written dozens or even hundreds of times. Confused by what we’re reporting? Consult your doctor. Uncertain whether to believe the latest good or bad news about breast cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, or stem cells? Talk to your doctor.
We don’t make this up; we write it because our sources tell us that’s what our readers or listeners should do. But who is helped by that? Most doctors found out about the new mammography guidelines the same time the rest of us did. Some of them might have taken the time to look up the panel’s report and read it. Many probably did not. And few of them are qualified to evaluate it.
That’s true even for oncologists who specialize in breast cancer. They know a lot about how cancer drugs work, and which ones to use in particular circumstances, and when a lumpectomy is the right call. But they may know little about the risks and benefits of mammograms; that’s not their field.
Radiologists know a lot about mammograms, but their expertise is in using them to diagnose cancer, not in population-wide assessments of risks and benefits.
The people who might know something about this are preventive medicine specialists and epidemiologists, or other doctors who have chose to specialize in this kind of public-health analysis in addition to learning to treat disease.
Most readers who see “consult your doctor” do not have a doctor who’s qualified to comment on new research findings. Medical students are not routinely taught research methods. Few study epidemiology or public health. They treat the sick; that’s what they’re good at.
Wait a minute! I’ve got it: “Consult your family’s epidemiologist!”
An obstetrician once complained to my wife, Elizabeth, a medical reporter, about these stories.”Why do you send your readers to us?” she said. “We don’t know what to tell them!”
Starting now, when somebody tells us that readers “should consult their doctors,” we should press them for more than that. What doctors? Who is in a position to provide useful advice on this? Where should readers and listeners go if their doctors don’t have the appropriate expertise, or if they don’t have a doctor?
We owe our audience a little bit more effort on this. Or else we should drop the line, “consult your doctor.” In many cases, it’s worthless advice.
- Paul Raeburn
November 21st, 2009 at 2:05 pm
[...] why there’s so much skepticism in the general public. As Paul Raeburn jokes in a recent Knight Science Journalism Tracker item, we can’t just consult our healthcare epidemiologist to tell us what to do and [...]