Health news: Media covers cancer stories poorly

Don’t get me wrong, I prefer good health news. Its much more inspiring to hear of innovation, burgeoning cures, survival, getting better, being healthy. But in addition to shades of grey, health news is black and white: With the good news comes bad, the possibility of dying or being plain miserable.

The news media isn’t so good about covering that bad news when it comes to cancer. That’s the conclusion of a new paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine that analyzed 2228 cancer stories from 436 randomly selected American newspapers and magazines. Most articles focused on breast (35%) or prostate (15%) cancers, the most common gender-specific cancers in women and men, 20% addressed cancer more broadly. While interest in cancer is likely motivated by our fear of dying from it, only 7.6% of stories focused on death, while 32% were about survival and being cured, and only 2.3% dealt with survival and death. .

"It is surprising that few articles discuss death and dying considering that half of all patients diagnosed as having cancer will not survive," the authors write. "The findings are also surprising given that scientists, media critics and the lay public repeatedly criticize the news for focusing on death."

Stories of treatment and survival are certainly more uplifting, but even there most failed to provide the whole story: 57% focused on aggressive treatments, but only 13% mentioned that they’re not always successful or that some cancer is incurable. Adverse events of treatments, such as pain, nausea, and hair loss, where mentioned in 30% of stories. End of life (palliative) care was seldom covered: 0.5% of stories focused on it exclusively, and 2.5% mentioned it along side discussions of aggressive treatments.

It’s tempting to over-simplify health stories, assuming that a condition is treatable in all people who undergo a certain treatment for a certain amount of time. But it’s almost always more complicated than that. With cancer in particular, death is often a very real possibility, and while we try desperately to avoid death, it’s not a “bad” thing. Its part of the story of those things we call cancer.

Telling the whole story about health and disease is not just a hallmark of good journalism, it’s part of the larger picture of ethical, patient-centered health care. Over the years we’ve grown accustomed to waging “war” against cancer, where death equals defeat. And in war its considered poor form to plan for defeat. But cancer isn’t an enemy, and treatment isn’t war. We do our best to cure people, but must also be aware that some cancers aren’t curable, and sometimes the best treatment is to stop combating the cancer and focus on controlling symptoms, managing pain, coming to terms with mortality, and letting the natural progression of disease take its course. That’s not failure, that’s not defeat, it is part of being human. It’s also what palliative care provides, and it all begins, I believe, with telling the full story about cancer, health, life, and death.

Photo credit: The author

Tracking health with social and new media

News of the Chilean earthquake carries greater resonance coming so soon on the heals of the devastating health and human costs witnessed in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake.

As you watch coverage of this and other health disasters, some social and new media outlets can offer interesting insights not available from the main stream “old media” outlets, i.e. television, radio, and newspapers. I’m using one such service called Trendrr.com to track the number of Twitter and Google News postings that contain the words “Chile” and “Earthquake.”

Trendrr provides “real-time social & digital media tracking.” A subscription service, you can get a limited number of searches for free. They are a powerful tool for anyone interested in how new and social media (web-enabled information sharing) is informing users about health, disasters, or other social phenomenon.

For example, the number of Google News stories about the Chilean earthquake swiftly went from 2057 on the morning of the event to over 16,000 the next day, and near 24,000 by the third day. Twitter postings about the subject went from 6225 an hour at noon EST on Saturday up to 9196 four hours later, then declined to 449 within 24 hours.

Meanwhile, Trendrr data also shows that even as old media coverage of Haiti has all but disappeared, the number of new fans on Partners In Health’s (PIH) Facebook page continues to grow. PIH is the preeminent health NGO in Haiti, and continued growth in their fan base indicates that at least among Facebook users, there is continued interest in the Haiti story.

Why might we care? It informs us about how social media users are engaging with and sharing health-related information. Such users are not necessarily the same as non-users, so what we learn may not apply to the rest of the population. But interesting hypothesis can still be generated. Coverage of disasters in the old media fades rapidly, and journalists claim that this reflects fading consumer interest. But it could reflect short attention span among journalists, or industry inability to reductions in the number of journalists have reduced media capacity to concurrently follow multiple long-term stories? Social media research, using tools such as Trendrr, raises the spectacle that perhaps social media users are the types of information seekers that desire both instant access to news on the ground, as well as long term coverage of stories. The approach of the old media, meanwhile, is geared towards satisfying an audience who is tolerant of slow, short term, and generally shallow coverage of complex events.

We may also learn of potential new applications for social media. Could Twitter be a format that allows lay-sentinels to report unusual health events, raising a red flag for disease surveillance experts to investigate? Tools like Trendrr allow comparison between old and new media responses. I’m currently doing just that, and will let you know what I find.

Have you used social marketing tracking for interesting health-related research? Let us know which services, and what you’ve found!