Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - How much stock do you put in health-related news reports?

snowy · 05-31-2011, 05:34 PM

Thanks to my wonderful college education, I possess the ability to read actual studies and make sense of them. I generally don't rely on mainstream media to provide me with health information; I find the way they write about health and science to often be full of hyperbole and overblown claims. Sometimes catching a headline will motivate me to look something up in EBSCOhost/Elsevier/etc. and find the study it came from; more than once I've wondered how the writer of the article came to the conclusion they came to.

A couple of pet peeves of mine: claims made about studies with impossibly small sample sizes, and claims made generalizing the results from animal studies to the human population.

So basically zero, but it does motivate me to read a lot of studies!

05-31-2011, 05:34 PM	#3 (permalink)
snowy Kick Ass Kunoichi Location: Oregon	Thanks to my wonderful college education, I possess the ability to read actual studies and make sense of them. I generally don't rely on mainstream media to provide me with health information; I find the way they write about health and science to often be full of hyperbole and overblown claims. Sometimes catching a headline will motivate me to look something up in EBSCOhost/Elsevier/etc. and find the study it came from; more than once I've wondered how the writer of the article came to the conclusion they came to. A couple of pet peeves of mine: claims made about studies with impossibly small sample sizes, and claims made generalizing the results from animal studies to the human population. So basically zero, but it does motivate me to read a lot of studies! __________________ If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau