I learned about this news from e-Patient Dave's blog ( https://www.epatientdave.com/2018/10/31/the-polluted-stream-of-health-care-information-health-news-review-podcast/ ), in which he leads off, "It ticks me off that the excellent site HealthNewsReview.org is going out of business due to lack of funding. More on that below. This independent website has for 12+ years been teaching us all how to watch out for BS in health news stories; they’re so important for informed health consumers..."

 

Looking at the "What we stood for" and "The Mighty Mouse Watchdog" sections of the HealthNewsReview.org release, it seems clear that, in principle, they have been endeavoring to provide a valuable service. They are seeking to help health journalists and the general public alike to, "improve their critical thinking about health care, and about claims made in research, in journal articles, and in the marketing rollout of new health care interventions in the medical arms race."

 

This development matters because, frankly, the opioid epidemic was allowed to spiral out of control to become our nation's gravest public health crisis in part because insufficient critical thinking was applied to "scientific" claims that opioids were not addictive (as well as to thoughtful analysis of the perverse financial incentives and power structures that amplified all the negative externalities). That's all a topic for a separate discussion...

 

The question I wish to raise here is whether HealthNewsReview.org is an isolated case, or is it symptomatic of evaporating demand for the type of public service it professes to offer? If the latter, what does that mean for preventing (or at least identifying safety signals earlier in) the next crisis like the opioid epidemic?