Many people get their health information from newspapers. But how well do such publications present the facts? A new SFU study and an organization that monitors press coverage of medical issues say that health reporting in the mainstream media needs a lot of improvement.

According to "Telling Stories: News media, health literacy, and public policy in Canada", which was published in the May 2007 issue of the journal Social Science & Medicine , papers tend to run simplistic, sensational stories on health-care management far more often than articles that explore the major factors affecting people's health.

Michael Hayes, associate dean of health sciences at SFU, and five other researchers analyzed more than 4,700 health-related stories that ran between 1993 and 2001 in 13 daily Canadian newspapers. They found that 65 percent of articles focused on issues such as long waiting lists and rising health-care costs, while only 5.9 percent looked at the impact of socioeconomic factors–like income, education, employment, and social violence–on health outcomes.

As Hayes explains, socioeconomic factors, or the "social gradient", have a fundamental impact on health outcomes. In other words, those with the most power and wealth tend to have the best health outcomes, while those with the least have the poorest outcomes.

"And yet when I read a newspaper, I don't read anything about that," Hayes says in a phone interview. "The social environment–things like housing, the nature and quality of our work”¦social-support networks–is absolutely crucial to shaping those health outcomes.”¦Yet I see stories about waiting lists and emergency rooms with forlorn-looking grannies on gurneys that grab headlines. There's almost no discussion about social determinants."

Hayes says that the predominance of stories about health-care management and delivery leads to public and political complacency.

"Having a national child-care strategy and a national housing policy should be part of our health agenda, but we never get that far. Social programs are, in fact, health-related.”¦What guides our understanding of public health today is invisible in today's newspaper reporting."

It's not just the content of articles that riles some researchers, but the way in which reporters cover specific treatments.

University of Victoria researcher Alan Cassels is the project leader of Media Doctor Canada ( www.mediadoctor.ca/ ), a Web site that reviews news stories on medical drugs and therapies and rates them using a five-star system. He says that one of the biggest problems with health reporting is that journalists tend to highlight the purported benefits of new therapies while downplaying potential risks.

Cassels coauthored a 2003 study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives called "Drugs in the news: How well do Canadian newspapers report the good, the bad and the ugly of new prescription drugs?", which was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal .

"There was a disconnect between what the study said and what the journalist said," Cassels says on the line from Victoria. "I think the media is getting a little bit better. Five years ago, 67 percent of articles didn't mention a single side effect of a drug.”¦I think that's better now. Journalists are more savvy and less bamboozled by the marketing shtick."

But he adds that when reporters do include caveats–that research is preliminary, inconclusive, or has only been carried out in rodents, for instance–they tend to place them at the end of a story.

"Just today there was a story about a study that came out saying red wine reduces the risk of prostate cancer," Cassels says, referring to a report out of Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. "The headlines might sell papers, and people will say, 'Great, I can keep drinking wine,' but the story didn't mention that it was a small study.”¦The devil is in the details."

Cassels, who coauthored with Ray Moynihan 2005's Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients (Greystone Books), started Media Watch Canada in 2005. The site is an offshoot of the original Media Doctor, based in Australia. Among the site's objectives is ensuring that all important information associated with new treatments is reported, including benefits, harms, costs, adverse effects, availability, and conflicts of interest.

Consider as an example a recent story on a diabetes drug that ran in the May 22 Vancouver Sun and many other media outlets. Headlined "Diabetes drug can dramatically raise heart attack risk, study finds", the story looked at research into rosiglitazone, which goes by the brand name Avandia. Media Doctor gave the article a score of one and a half stars out of five and classified it as a "harm story".

"The article scores 'not satisfactory' on a number of key criteria, including failing to quantify the harm involved, not providing information on which patients may be most susceptible to the harm of heart attacks, and not providing any sense of the strength of the evidence on which the new work is based," the Web site explains. "It [the article] says that the drug 'was linked to a "significant risk" of heart attacks' but it is not clear if these are statistically significant or clinically significant risks. There are a number of alternatives to rosiglitazone which may not carry this risk of cardiovascular [disease] and these are not mentioned at all in the story."

Of the news outlets monitored by Media Doctor, the Globe and Mail and the National Post rank the highest, each with an average article rating of 55 percent. The Vancouver Sun 's average article rating is 39 percent, while the Victoria Times Colonist 's is 22 percent. "In general, the coverage of new medical treatments in the lay press is regarded as poor," the Web site states.

"With increasing pressure on healthcare funding," the site says, "it is important that the lay press adopts a neutral position on the value of expensive medical treatments, and is able to provide accurate and unbiased information to the public."

According to an article in the August 1999 issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal , a random poll of 250 doctors found that just 34 percent believe the media deliver accurate coverage of health information.

So far, Hayes's study has not been covered in any major daily.