Evidence and the BBC

An interesting piece of reporting has occurred on the BBC website. A new study is quoted describing the fact that decisions in healthcare are often not made according to the best research. If you read back over the posts in the blog you will realise that this idea runs throughout many of my entries. It bothers me that the physiotherapy profession ,despite making significant progress in it's use of evidence, still remains heavily dependent on subjective opinion rather than seeking to strictly adopt practices for which there is good evidence. And this works both ways. Not only are large amounts of what go on in physiotherapy without sound research to suport it, but there is good evidence to support many things which we don't do. Here I rest my case!

However the point I want to raise today is not the much debated role of clinicians using the best evidence but perhaps what should be called evidence based healthcare reporting. The BBC along with most other parts of the mass media have a biassed, non-evidence based approach to reporting health so that what counts for fact quoted by them is regularly biassed and hysterical, designed to create anger or anxiety in the audience and not to provide accurate analysis of an issue. Reporting of pandemics, climate change and the issues in the NHS all have a hysterical quality and do not let the public understand many of the serious issues behind the stories, nor do they encourage the public to analyse the issues themselves. These media organisations set themselves up as experts when if you look at what they are saying about just one area,health, you will realise that they selectively report those subjects likely to create the biggest reaction. Although we need more evidence based practice in health we need something even more-evidence based healthcare reoprting.