The point of the cartoon above by Eric Allie holds true for the recently released Jupiter study: the reporting of the data by the media often overshadows the actual data.

Let’s first take a look at the reporting.

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For the second time in as many days I’ve been inspired by a New York Times column.  Everywhere you turn it seems, you hear people lamenting that we could reduce health care costs so much if only we were more in tune with preventative care.  Everyone pays it lip service, including the two candidates for president who both pride themselves on straight talk.  Writes Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, professor of medicine at Dartmouth in today’s paper:

Senator John McCain argues that “the best care is preventative care,” and his health care reform plan claims that “by emphasizing prevention” and other measures “we can reduce health care costs.” Senator Barack Obama’s plan says, “Simply put, in the absence of a radical shift towards prevention and public health, we will not be successful in containing medical costs or improving the health of the American people.”

It may sound like common sense. But it is still a myth.

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I’ve made mention in these pages numerous times of the dubious practice of medical researchers being on the payrolls of the pharmaceutical industry.  I’ve known about these shady alliances for my entire career, but what I didn’t know was just how lucrative they were for the researchers involved.  This past weekend both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times reported on drug company payments to a prominent Emory University psychiatrist and researcher and former editor of the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

Senator Charles Grassley (R. Iowa) is probing into this mess because any federally-funded research is supposed to free of financial conflicts of interest.  Enforcement of these rules is usually left to the universities employing the researchers, which are apparently easily flim flammed by the researchers involved.  In the specific case reported by both papers, the Emory researcher Dr. Charles Nemeroff, was instructed by Emory not to take more than $10,000 per year from GlaxoSmithKline, the drug company for whom he was doing research on their bestselling antidepressant drug Paxil.  But despite his assurances to Emory that his income from Glaxo was within the limits, Dr. Nemeroff’s take was just a little more. Read more »

A couple of months ago I posted several times on an Israeli study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (full-text here) showing that low-carb diets brought about more weight loss and better lipid profiles than low-fat diets.   (See the various posts here, here and here)   Based upon how the press reported this study,   I figured that it would drift into the haze of history and never be mentioned again.   After all, this wasn’t a particularly good study – there are many others better done that show an even greater effect.   And they were all forgotten.   None made any impact on the mainstream docs.   Why should this one be different?

Imagine my surprise today when I got my emailed weekly version of Medscape Internal Medicine and found not just a lukewarm recommendation for the low-carb diet, but an enthusiastic one.

Medscape is a subscription service available only to physicians and is as mainstream as it gets. The lead article in this weeks issue is not really an article, but a video lecture.   One Dr. Sandra Fryhofer lectures the mainstream docs subscribing to Medscape on what the above study shows.   She points out the weaknesses of the low-fat diet and is positively enthusiastic about the low-carb diet.   She does issue a disclaimer, i.e., that the study was partially funded by the Atkins Foundation, but that’s about all.

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