Breakthroughitis
Here’s a good post by science writer Merrill Goozner on a new, possibly unworthy early screening test for prostate cancer. In taking down a celebratory front-page article last week in The NY Times by Gina Kolata, Goozner notes that there are already problems with the existing biomarker screen, the PSA, or prostate specific antigen—which Kolata herself noted in 2004. He asks whether our healthcare system really needs a new expensive diagnostic with questionable efficacy for a disease that affects many old men but isn’t always the main factor in their death. Kolata is notoriously trigger-happy with Big Medical News. You can’t help but admire her tenaciousness and energy, and she is usually right, but Kolata has a tendency to oversell stories of medical breakthroughs. She’s not alone, of course. Breakthroughitis is a chronic ailment of us medical writers. It’s hard to write breaking medical news because the latest publication, even in high-status journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, and the Lancet, are rarely conclusive. Most studies about drugs and diseases provide only a piece of the evidence. Convincing statements on the cause and treatment of disease are usually the result of decades of research and consensus.
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