Using claims in the media to teach essential concepts for evidence-based healthcare

Abstract

Healthcare students and professionals, as well as patients and everyone else, are exposed to countless health claims—particularly claims about the effects of interventions—spreading further and faster than ever, via the Internet. Many of the claims are unreliable, such as those that conflate correlation and causation. Meanwhile, many people are unable to critically assess their reliability. For example, here in Norway, a survey conducted in 2019 among a representative sample of the population—including healthcare professionals—indicated that a majority of Norwegians are unable to apply several fundamental concepts for assessing health claims and making informed health choices, such as the importance of similar comparison groups for finding intervention effects (149 of 771 participants were able). The combination of unreliable claims and inability to critically assess those claims can lead to uninformed choices (including shared decisions) and be a barrier to evidence-based healthcare (EBHC). Logically, this is a major explanatory factor in the known, worldwide overuse of ineffective and harmful medical services4 and underuse of effective services.