The conference was attended by medical and health journalists, scientific journal editors, physicians, industry representatives, government officials, public information officers, public relations professionals, patients and representatives of patient advocacy groups.
"Reports on medicine and health consistently rank among the top five topics covered by national and local media," says William Lanier, M.D., one of three co-chairs of the conference. "The goal of this conference was to bring together all facets of the medical news dissemination process in hopes of identifying ways to more effectively serve the public."
The conference, attended by more than 400 participants, started with a keynote address by Secretary Tommy Thompson, United States Department of Health and Human Services, on the nation's preparedness for bioterrorism. The remainder of the conference included case studies and panel discussion groups that stimulated significant debate.
Pat Mitchell, president and chief executive officer of Public Broadcasting Service, one of three conference co-chairs, led advisory panel members and attendees in review of the conference's preliminary observations at the conclusion of the conference. Preliminary key observations included:
- Medical news reports may be confusing because the underlying scientific issues are unresolved and open to multiple interpretations.
- Patient stories are intrinsically interesting and useful to illustrate medical news stories. Ill patients are vulnerable and have special needs for privacy. A patient may be getting into more than she or he anticipated when agreeing to be the subject of a medical news story.
- Journalists' primary concern is accurate, clear reporting, with secondary concern for a story's consequences. Journalists consider themselves primarily reporters rather than educators, but the public expects reporting to contain an educational element.
- Financial and other more subtle interests may influence the quality and content of scientific news releases, presentations in scientific journals and stories covered by the news media. Disclosure of commercial support and affiliations, peer review of study reports and formal guidelines for conduct may lessen undue influence.
- Public health officials have a responsibility to be accessible and to provide information that is both truthful and accurate.
- Good medical reporting includes an explanation of why one study has more validity than others. Reporting the failure rate from a scientific study is as important as reporting the success rate.
- Medical journals' main constituents are physician readers. These journals rely on the news media to convey medical information to the public. Journal editors have a responsibility to provide the highest quality information possible, based on optimally designed research protocols, proper data analysis and conclusions anchored to the best available scientific information.
- Information from research studies loses detail as it moves from the medical journal to newspapers and local television news. These truncated stories may frustrate physicians and the public.
- The reporting of a medical news story by the news media may itself become the news and compete for attention with the findings of the study published in a scientific journal.
These findings, along with additional observations, will be the subject of an article on medicine and the media in an upcoming edition of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Mayo Clinic's peer-reviewed, indexed medical journal.
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