Over the past 10 months in these Editor’s Pages, I have often encouraged my cardiologist colleagues to observe our responsibilities as teachers, leaders, and caregivers. However, in this Editor’s Page, I turn my attention to different guardians of society: the media. As physicians, we are required to take an oath to “do no harm” first and foremost. Even though journalists may seem removed from this responsibility to patients, they publish stories that could affect the health choices of hundreds or thousands of individuals. To examine this issue, a team of reviewers (many of whom were physicians) evaluated the reporting by U.S. news organizations on new medical treatments, tests, products, and procedures 1. After reviewing 1,889 stories (approximately 43% newspaper articles, 30% wire or news services stories, 15% online pieces, and 12% network television stories), the reviewers graded most stories unsatisfactory on 5 of 10 review criteria: costs, benefits, harms, quality of the evidence, and comparison of the new approach with alternatives.
Accordingly, I would like to suggest that journalists and researchers must share equally in shouldering the burden of responsibility to improve appropriate communication about basic and clinical research.
First, there is an obligation on the part of the researchers not to inflate the importance of their findings. This has been widely recognized as damaging, especially if bias is introduced in the paper (2). To address any of these concerns that are not always rectified in the peer-review process, we added 2 aspects to theJournal over the past 10 months. We now invite an independent editorial comment for every original research paper published. In addition, we have added the Clinical Perspectives section at the end of each original investigation, which is a pragmatic summary that contains a competency component (i.e., learning implications for the reader that may be applicable to the contemporary care of the patient) and a translational outlook component (i.e., anticipation of the next or future steps of research that may be applicable or developed by our research community). Incidentally, in our fall 2014 readership survey, we learned that 82% of readers of the Journal find the editorial comments extremely or very useful and 71% find the Clinical Perspectives extremely or very useful. Thus, original research in the Journal should no longer be read in isolation, without the accompaniment of its editorial comment and Clinical Perspectives. These were changes that I instituted when I took over as editor, and I stand by their importance.
To see more of this article by Valentin Fuster, MD, PhD, see the link
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