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Australian Epidemiologist Carves Out A
Role On Social Media
Blogging,
Tweeting, and Podcasting To Counter Misleading Presentations Of
Scientific Findings
An
epidemiologist working in diabetes and chronic disease with Blacktown
Hospital in Sydney Australia and calling himself Gid M-K Health Nerd
has created a blog on public health and science topics in the media,
many of them about misleading articles and headlines. Begun three
years ago by Gideon Meyerowitz Katz (aka Gid M-K), the blog,
which has some 14,000 followers, has addressed such topics as:
Bacon Is Not The Enemy
5 Misleading Headlines Sponsored By The Food Industry
Sugar Isn’t Giving Us All Cancer
Roundup Isn’t Poisoning Your Cheerios
Blueberries Can’t Treat Heart Disease
Relative vs Absolute Risk
Twitter Account
This latter topic about risk was the trigger for the
creation of a Twitter account started three months ago with the handle
@justsayrisks. Its tagline is “both relatively risky and relatively
funny but absolutely scientific.”
Gid M-K identifies a study’s
reported relative risk followed by his or the study’s calculation of
the actual absolute risk. The goal is to show people that the risk
they may have envisioned in hearing or reading about the study in the
media was in all likelihood the relative risk and that seeing the
absolute risk gives the reader a quite different perspective.
Examples
Examples posted on the Twitter account include a study
which claimed that diabetes could raise the risk of stillbirth by four
times or 300-400% whereas the absolute risk was calculated as 1-1.8%.
Another reported that people who spend 5 hours or more per day on
their phone are 43% more likely to be obese whereas the absolute risk
increase was estimated at 1-2%. There are multiple other examples he
tweets about.
Origins
According to Gid M-K, the account “speaks to people”
because of its simplicity. The idea for the Twitter account actually
came from the creation of a friend who started a wildly popular
Twitter account @justsayinmice. That account advocates countering many
misleading headlines in media reports of scientific studies by
pointing out early in the article that the study was conducted in
mice.
It was a “brilliant idea”, an overnight success on
Twitter said Gid M-K. He told the Epi Monitor he wanted to steal the
idea by creating relativelyrisky@justsayrisks. Gid M-K had been misled
himself by earlier reports about the risks of ibuprofen and heart
attacks because the relative risks were presented in a misleading way
and he wanted to help correct this misleading approach in the media.
He now simply enough just tweets out risks to some 7,000 followers.
Podcast Too
Not content with a blog and a twitter account, Gid M-K
has also started a weekly podcast on Sound Cloud entitled
Sensationalist Science which discusses sensationalist headlines and
their true explanations. The podcasts have been approximately 10-12
minutes long and have covered such topics as medical mistakes,
solvents and autism, red meat, artificial sweeteners, and the moderate
drinking myth.
Meyerowitz Katz is pursuing a doctoral degree part time
in epidemiology at the University of Wollongong in Sydney. To follow
Gid M-K go to one or more of the following:
Weekly Blog:
https://bit.ly/31luQHo
Daily Risk Tweets:
https://bit.ly/33gJEsN
Fortnightly Podcast:
https://bit.ly/31su7o0
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