Media Tends to Paint a Rosy Picture That May Mislead Patients With Cancer

News coverage of aggressive cancer treatments may mislead patients by not addressing palliative or end-of-life care, contend the authors of a Penn Medicine study published March 22, 2010, in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The research team of Jessica Fishman, Ph.D., et al, looked at news stories related to cancer reported in major news magazines and large city daily newspapers from 2005 to 2007. They found that 32 percent of the 436 articles they sampled focused on survival, with only 8 percent covering death and dying. The majority of stories emphasized aggressive cancer treatments, with a mere 2 percent addressing end-of-life palliative or hospice care. Additionally, 13 percent of the articles reported failure rates of aggressive cancer treatments, while only 30 percent related the adverse affects of these treatments, according to a press release at www.uphs.upenn.edu/news.

“The nation’s leading media institutions have set a low bar for routine coverage of the nation’s long-running war on cancer. Hype is the norm,” wrote medical author Merrill Goozner, M.S., in a commentary that accompanies the study. “The relationship between journalism and medical researchers has been called a complicit collaboration in which both benefit from sensationalized stories.”

The authors concluded that, “The absence of reporting about hospice and palliate care is significant given the numerous well-documented benefits for patients and family members.”