I am less concerned by the stories themselves, than by how readily people take the headline - which everyone knows is sensationalism - as fact, without reading the article, let alone looking for the research itself. I find it tremendously frustrating, as an "emerging healthcare professional" (how pretentious sounding! It's how my university has taken to describe us all... Used here with tongue firmly in cheek), to see these articles appear from sources that I think it's not unreasonable to expect to be trustworthy - namely newspapers, the BBC etc. Unfortunately as we all know they are not trustworthy, but for the majority of people this is where most health information comes from. I think that the media should be made to be more accountable for the crap that they print and that sensationalism shouldn't be allowed and should be punishable somehow. Generally I am not a supporter of punitive measures but desperate times and all that. For example, take the MMR vaccine. I am soon to qualify as a learning disabilities nurse, so this is something I am able to talk about with some degree of understanding - I shan't be so presumptuous as to say authority as that is where it becomes dangerous! However, the MMR scare that happened a few years ago was based on the shakiest and most shameful piece of "research", based on a small group of children who were at his child's birthday party! Any researcher would tell you that this immediately renders the research unsound! I could very easily select ten or fifteen people, from people I know, and come to the conclusion from that information that being from Essex causes you to smoke, as the only things they have in common (other than me) is that they are all from Essex and that they all smoke. But of course that is crap and everyone knows it! But that is what happened with this MMR thing; he chose from a non-representative sample, neglected to take confounding variables into account, and claimed that the MMR vaccine was a direct cause of autism. Oh, and of course failed to mention that his "research" was sponsored by... You guessed it! A manufacturer of separate measles, mumps and rubella vaccines. How handy. Yet this information was not so enthusiastically spread about, and nonetheless, the damage was done and now we are seeing children with brain damage and learning disabilities as a result of contracting those illnesses. And yet this man is still allowed to run around making stupid statements willy-nilly. It frustrates and annoys me that people are allowed to spread this sort of thing under the guise of a public service. It double frustrates me that it then leads to people criticising the hell out of the NHS which, I will grant, are not the most incredible, but with what we've got, those of us at ground level do the best we can! Lots of medicine IS just guesswork, because despite all the knowledge we have about the human body, it's still only a fraction of what is actually happening. Treatments etc are often based on "try this because it's worked for lots of other people" which I admit doesn't look very good, but when that's all you've got to go on, it's better than nothing, and I would sooner try something and it not work, on the off-chance that it might, than not try something because it can't be explained to me exactly how it works. And sometimes, incorrect diagnoses are initially made because lots of things have common symptoms, even things which in the end don't seem remotely related. I'm not advocating or making excuses for bad practice, I just think that sometimes errors in judgement that are actually quite reasonable (in terms of things like; looks like something else that has many similarities despite some, at times huge, differences) are made to be poor nursing/medical care/decision making. I sometimes think that people forget that doctors, nurses, carers etc etc are just people at the end of the day, the same as sadly, some doctors, nurses, carers etc forget that the people to whom they are providing care are also people... I guess I am trying to say that everyone is falliable.
But going back to my initial point, I find it very frustrating that this sort of sensationalism is allowed to go on as, above and beyond anything else, it is DANGEROUS. People are spoonfed this ridiculous information, and don't go out and find out for themselves. I'm not remotely saying that people should "do as they are told and take the medicines they are told"; far from it. However I am saying that I think that people need to remember or learn how to think for themselves again, rather than take things at face value just because some arse at a newspaper has written down hearsay and conjecture and passed it off as fact by being bolshy.
And on the subject of bolshy, I shall now climb down from my soapbox and my high horse.
I just hope that I haven't managed to offend anyone; I know how easily I seem to do that!
*eta that when I say "people" I am not referring to anyone specific, here or elsewhere! I'm using it in the sense of "the Royal you".
