Andre Picard of the Toronto Globe & Mail adds to my recent "Ten troublesome trends in TV health news" with his own list of the ways to improve medical reporting in 2005.
Picard's conclusion: "Good health reporting should provide a straightforward, comprehensible summary of health issues. It has to be more than regurgitation. It needs to be balanced and provide context to information-hungry consumers.
Good health reporting should rarely be sensational, but always skeptical.
And there should be a lot more of it.
Until the media improve the quality of their work, their criticism of other players in the health system can hardly be taken seriously."
Amen.
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