Trick or Treatment—The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine (Electronic book text)

Mass media is a powerful force for influencing the public, which is why it deserves two slots in this list of top ten culprits. In the previous section we explained that the media exaggerates the benefits of alternative medicine, but in this section we will focus on how newspapers and television also sensationalize the risks of conventional medicine.

A 1999 survey of British newspapers by Professor Edzard Ernst sampled four broadsheet newspapers on eight separate days and discovered 176 articles relating to medicine. Twenty-six of the articles concerned alternative medicine, and they were unanimously positive — it seems that alternative medicine is almost beyond criticism. By contrast, the remaining articles about mainstream medicine were roughly 60 per cent critical or negative.

Without doubt, certain aspects of mainstream medicine deserve to be criticized, but the problem here is that newspapers and broadcasters are trigger happy. They cannot resist turning minor issues into major scares or presenting tentative findings as serious threats to the nation’s health. For example, there have been numerous scare stories over the years suggesting that mercury-based dental fillings are toxic. These include a 1994 news report entitled ‘The Poison in Your Mouth’, which was part of the BBC current-affairs series Panorama. There was, however, no real evidence to warrant these concerns.

In fact, a major study in 2006 confirmed numerous previous investigations showing that the fears over mercury fillings were groundless. Researchers monitored the health of 1,000 children who had received either mercury fillings or mercury-free fillings. Over the course of several years there was no significant difference between the two groups in terms of their kidney function, memory, coordination, IQ and other qualities. Although this was the most important paper ever published in this field, the journalist and clinician Ben Goldacre made a very telling observation:

As far as I am aware there is no Panorama documentary in the pipeline covering the startling new research data suggesting that mercury fillings may not be harmful after all. In the UK there is not a single newspaper article to be found. Not a word on this massive landmark study, published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.

In this particular case, the media merely scared the public away from mercury fillings and towards more expensive, less reliable options, which then require more visits to the dentist. In other episodes of media hysteria, the consequences are far more serious. For example, the news stories concerning the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) triple vaccine have genuinely endangered the health of thousands of children. Reports have tended to exaggerate the significance of preliminary or insubstantial research that questions the safety of MMR, while ignoring the high-quality research that demonstrates that the MMR triple jab is the safest option for children.

Irresponsible media coverage has caused a significant drop in the number of parents vaccinating their children, which in turn has already led to several measles outbreaks — the threat of a substantial epidemic still looms. Perhaps the media takes such a cavalier attitude because it has forgotten the damage caused by measles. While measles is merely an inconvenience for most families, it will cause ear infections for 1 in 20 children, respiratory problems for 1 in 25, convulsions for 1 in 200, meningitis or encephalitis for 1 in 1,000, and death for 1 in 5,000 children. In 2006 a British child died after contracting measles, the first such death in the UK for fourteen years.

In effect, poor reporting has started to undo the work of generations of researchers, who have devoted their careers to the battle against disease. Maurice Hilleman, for example, was born into a poor Montana family in 1919, living on a single meal a day and sleeping in a bunk ridden with bedbugs. He witnessed how childhood diseases had decimated his community, which later inspired him to develop eight of the fourteen vaccines routinely given to children, including MMR. He lived just long enough to witness the controversy over his life-saving vaccine. His colleague Adel Mahmoud still recalls Hilleman’s reaction:

It saddened him to see that knowledge was twisted in such a way to play into the hands of the anti-vaccine movement and not really appreciate what vaccines are all about. They are about protection of the individual, but also protection of the society so that you achieve herd immunity. Maurice believed in that and it pained him a lot to see what was happening in the UK.