Flawed reporting of herbal trials

Thursday November 27th, 2008

Most media reporting of drug trials and alternative medicines is flawed, researchers claimed today.

Reports underplay side-effects and the risks attached to treatments - especially when herbal remedies are under discussion, according to the analysis of some 500 newspaper articles.

And the reports also failed to identify who paid for trials or whether scientists had a conflict of interest, according to the article in BMC Medicine.

The stories reported on some 48 drug trials and 57 herb trials.

Researcher Tania Bubela said many stories left out basic information such as the number of patients in the trial, the methods used and the dose used.

Dr Bubela, of the University of Alberta, Canada, said the reports might be biased against alternative therapies - as they tended to be based on mainstream medical journals.

She said: "Unfortunately, the media still rely for their sources on high quality medical journals, which are more likely to report negative results about complementary and alternative medicine and positive results about pharmaceuticals.

"The clinical trials in the study showed no difference in quality between herbal remedy and pharmaceutical trials, but complementary and alternative medicine was still reported on more sceptically."

Herbal Remedy Clinical Trials in the Media: a Comparison with the Coverage of Conventional Pharmaceuticals: Tania Bubela, Heather Boon and Timothy Caulfield, BMC Medicine 2008, 6:35 doi:10.1186/1741-7015-6-35

Tags: Alternative Therapy | World Health

Printer friendly page