As anyone who closely follows the popular press's coverage of science knows, the latest cure, treatment, or supplement is often touted as being more important or revolutionary than it actually is. But the blame lies not so much with the media outlets reporting the stories, or the press offices that issue releases to catch journalists' eyes, but with the researchers themselves, according to a study that appears in the latest issue of PLoS Medicine.
A team of French researchers combed 498 press releases announcing the results of scientific trials on treatments for cancers, diabetes, fibromyalgia, diarrhea, and a slew of other maladies from December 2009 to March 2010 in the EurekAlert! database. They then identified 70 that pertained to 2-arm, parallel-group randomized control trials (RCTs), and found the corresponding studies as published in the primary literature and all the related news stories written about the research. Forty percent of the ...
