A call for healthy skepticism to improve critical thinking about health care

Profile of our 16 years of work on HealthNewsReview.org

This week, I spoke via Zoom to Georgetown University’s graduate program on Health and the Public Interest (HAPI). The webinar was also open to registration by the general public.

Georgetown has posted a YouTube video of my talk, which I’m sharing with you, below.

At the heart of the talk was what my team did in publishing daily on our website, HealthNewsReview.org, from 2006-2018 - with foundation support - and which I kept going for four more years without funding. If you’re not aware of that site - what we did, how we did it. and why - the YouTube video above is a great starting point. You could also read a 2014 paper, A Guide To Reading Health Care News Stories, which I had published in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal.

At the core of this work was how our team used 10 systematic criteria to review and grade news stories - and later public relations news releases as well - that included claims of efficacy or safety in health care interventions (treatments, tests, products, procedures, etc.). Here’s a mousepad that we’d give out to journalists and other interested parties. It contains the 10 criteria we applied more than 3,600 times to media messages.

I could go on giving a history lesson, but I invite readers to watch the YouTube video and send me questions or comments about the project or about the talk I gave at Georgetown.

As always, thanks for your interest in this work.