As a scientist, sometimes I cringe when I read reports in the mainstream media about scientific discoveries. Since the news reporter has to make it to-the-point and catchy, a lot of the science is lost… this, oftentimes, leads to inaccurate reporting. For example, what would you think if you read this headline:
“A New Drug Kills Cancer Cells”
Well, the headline suggests that a cancer cure has been found. Sounds Great, Right? The problem is that the message the reader takes from the headline is probably very different from the actual discovery, because the headline neglects at least two hugely important questions:
a) Which Cancer cells?
There a ton of different types of cancer… even within a type of cancer, let’s say colon cancer, there are many different reasons why colon cancer occur, and based on the stage and genetics of a tumor and the individual, drug A could work beautifully for patient 1 yet does absolutely nothing for patient 2.
b) How are the studies performed?
In labs around the world, every day scientists use compounds to kill cancer cells that grow on plastic dishes. This does not mean that these compounds are effective cancer therapies. At this point, these compounds are about 10 years of animal and clinical studies before they enter the marketplace.
Even the news stories, which provide more details, lack a certain level of depth that would capture the whole picture, which is probably necessary since the average person would not understand/not care about all the important technical details.
It is a double-edge sword, really. People would like to see the progress that the biomedical science field produces, but in order to communicate these stories to the average person, the result sometimes is the wrong or misleading message.
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