Whos afraid of the newspaper advice column?
Vikki Entwistle, PhD Vikki Entwistle is with the Health Services Research Unit, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Because many people look to the media for information on health care, media campaigns can influence patterns of health care service utilization. [1] Given its potential impact, there is general agreement that the information provided by the media should be of good quality; there is less consensus, however, about how the quality should be judged. In this issue Frank Molnar and colleagues report on 50 articles randomly selected from newspaper advice columns containing medical advice relevant to elderly people (page 393). [2] Five geriatricians assessed the articles on the following 5 criteria: ability to determine to whom the article applied, ability to distinguish opinion from fact, degree to which critical issues were addressed, the safety of the advice, and the appropriateness of the advice given. They concluded that “a significant percentage of the articles contained inap
