This is how you fact check medical news yourself

‘Doctor, I read in the newspaper that…’ is a frequently asked opening sentence in the doctor’s office, because we see many news items about health every day. Curious headlines are flying around us in the newspaper and on the internet. Also on our website, think of headlines such as: ‘Doing a dog at home reduces risk of asthma’, ‘Turmeric is good for the diet’ or ‘Dark chocolate makes you calm and satisfied’.

When reading such a headline, people often take a bar of dark chocolate with them into the supermarket, because good for you! But it is often more nuanced. You will only find out if you click further or read the entire message. Why do these kinds of messages appear everywhere, what can you as a reader do with them and how can you fact-check these kinds of messages yourself, i.e. check for facts?

We asked doctors Tijs Stehmann and Lester du Perron, the authors of the book ‘Doctor, I read in the newspaper that…’ Stehmann is a mathematician and doctor in training as a specialist in pediatrics at Emma Children’s Hospital Amsterdam UMC and Du Perron is a general practitioner and works as a doctor in training to become a specialist in hospital medicine in Amsterdam UMC. They started together in 2016 the Doctor Media platform, to nuance and interpret the medical news with the aim of preventing false hopes and unrealistic expectations.

The Doctor Media Method

To understand medical news properly, it is of course useful to have medical knowledge, but it is not necessarily necessary to excel in this. In their book, Stehmann and du Perron use the ‘Dokter Media method’ for this, a structured way of fact-checking step-by-step by means of four questions: from news item to underlying source, and then explaining in simple language what this news actually means. to the reader or patient. They also explain medical or statistical concepts such as causality (cause-effect relationship), placebo, or relative and absolute risks (see below) in a simple way on the basis of various examples. That makes it extra educational!

Take, for example, the news item ‘Doing a dog at home reduces risk of asthma’. This headline may suggest that you should get a dog to reduce asthma symptoms, while current advice is correct that asthmatics should not have a dog at home. What exactly is this?

Where does this news item come from?

That’s why they ask the question: ‘Where does this news item come from?’ As in most cases, the original source here is a scientific paper showing that children who frequently come into contact with dogs in the first year of life are 15 percent less likely to develop asthma later in life.

Is it new?

Then they check to what extent this is actually something ‘new’. For example, many previous studies have been done into a link between pets and the risk of getting asthma, which show varying results. The research on which the news item was now based did not therefore provide any new insight, but at the most a reason for follow-up research.

What can we do with this specifically?

The last question – ‘What can we do with this now?’ – is also the most important. Because even if having a dog in the first year of life would actually reduce the chance of getting asthma by 15 percent, what does that mean in concrete terms? That ’15 percent less chance’ describes a relative risk. For the patient, an absolute risk is much more interesting: what is my chance of developing asthma, with or without a dog? Knowing that asthma occurs in about 1 in 30 children in the Netherlands, it turns out that in practice as many as 200 families have to take a dog into their home to prevent just one patient with asthma! You can find a more detailed message about this at doctormedia.nl.

For example, using the Dokter Media method, which is further explained in the book, step-by-step, come a long way with independent fact-checking of a medical news item.

Do you also have a good question? Send us an email.

If you want to ask a question to Dokter Media, you can send an email to: www.doctermedia.nl