Richard Sullivan, Co-Director of the Centre for Conflict and Health Research, and Professor of Cancer and Global Health at King’s College London, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Technological innovation and systems strengthening need not be a zero-sum game.
But it’s beginning to feel a bit like this. Progress in cancer technologies is essential but not sufficient. The issue, it seems, is one of unrelenting hype, hyperbole, and science-washing when it comes to medical technologies.
We expect day-to-day commodities to be oversold to us, but when it comes to advances in medicine and science, Mertonian norms, especially organised skepticism, should be the order of the day. There is also little to no media focus on the day-to-day systemic realities and challenges that lead to unnecessary suffering and premature cancer mortality.
Invariably, the spotlight falls on ‘finding the cures’ and radical research. Both of which have their place in the public discourse, but without any sense of contextual reality, such narratives can feel dangerously like propaganda.
The hype around systemic therapies is a well-trodden path, but increasingly other forms of medtech, especially in screening and early detection, are receiving the same uncritical illumination.
Polygenic risk scores, for example, in prostate cancer screening – the BARCODE1 study – have been cheered as technologies that can ‘turn the tide on prostate cancer’ despite a whole raft of issues as to their clinical utility and implementation.
Worse has been the media coverage of the interim results of PATHFINDER2 – GRAIL’s Galleri multicancer blood detection test, which truly exemplifies the problem in science communication; commercially driven, premature framing of non-peer-reviewed data as proof of a transformative breakthrough.
The details you can read for yourself, but suffice it to say there was zero critical pushback from either the media or professional organisations. Instead, the science washing reached new levels of hyperbole. Organised skepticism has become organised dogmatism. Hype damages policy and, invariably, public trust.
Professional organisations, research funding organisations, patient organisations, and the community at large have a responsibility to not only rein in the hype but to vigorously challenge it when it does appear.”
More posts featuring Richard Sullivan on OncoDaily.