Gary Schwitzer‘s Health News Review sets a high bar for what makes a good medical story, as we all should. Not many stories reviewed by Schwitzer and his team come through with a perfect score, and plenty fail dramatically.

But a website redesign now allows Health News Review to play with its statistics, from reviews of more than 1,600 stories. And here’s the good news: When comparing the most recent 800 stories with the 800 previous stories, the stats show improvement in 8 of the 10 categories Schwitzer uses to rate them.

He briefly discusses the bad news first: Stories seem to be relying more heavily on news releases, as indicated by a couple of different measures.

But then he focuses on the good news:

• the 11% improvement over time in the rate of stories adequately quantifying benefits;
• the 9% improvement over time in the rate of stories evaluating the quality of the evidence;
• the 12% improvement over time in the rate of stories avoiding disease-mongering;
• the 7% improvement over time in the rate of stories comparing the new approach with existing alternatives.
• and average grades for four other criteria that all improved to a lesser degree.

Not bad.

Most stories continue to miss some of what Schwitzer considers essential, such as properly qualifying the benefits and possible harm of new treatments, and evaluating the evidence. Still, it’s nice to see some of the trend lines moving upward. And maybe Health News Review, for calling our attention to quality journalism, deserves some of the credit.

- Paul Raeburn

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2011 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Health & Medicine Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.