The ever-vigilant Gary Schwitzer at HealthNewsReview.org points out one of the worst uses of the word “breakthrough” on record. There should be some sort of award for this.
Schwitzer is fuming over cover language in the current issue of Prevention magazine. I don’t have a copy of the magazine, but the cover (which appears on Prevention’s website), sports the following: “Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough.”
“So I started flipping through the pages of tips for ‘jiggle-proof arms and abs’ and such,” Schwitzer writes, “and….voila…on page 13 I found the big story under another ‘Cancer Breakthrough’ heading. In 16 words in that little box, I learned that a vaccine was “moving into the testing phase.”
Reasonable people, Schwitzer continues, might “wait until we’ve moved out of the testing phase” before declaring a breakthrough.
It’s a solid critique, but Schwitzer, from what I can see, lets Prevention off easy.
I searched several different ways to find this tiny story on Prevention’s website, and I couldn’t find it.
So I looked at the screen shot of the article that Schwitzer posted, and he didn’t say this, but it appears to be a recruiting ad from the Mayo Clinic. That might explain why I couldn’t find it on the web–it might be an ad that appears only in the print edition. Here is the print item in its entirety, in a little yellow box, from Schwitzer’s screen shot (left):
A Cancer Breakthrough: A vaccine that could prevent breast or ovarian cancer recurrence is moving into the testing phase. Want to learn about how to participate? Call the Mayo Clinic’s clinical trials line at (507) 538-7623.
(If you click on the image, you should be able to read this yourself.)
Schwitzer is on the mark when he says the cover language (“Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough”) wildly overstated the news. But the “news” was apparently not even news–the cover language seems intended to recruit patients for a Mayo Clinic cancer vaccine study, maybe the one for which it got federal approval last August.
If this was an ad, Prevention gets a dart for making it look like editorial copy. If it was editorial copy, Prevention gets a dart for promoting the Mayo Clinic without saying anything about other vaccine trials that might be under way.
Prevention, in either case, has set a new standard for blatant misuse of the word “breakthrough.” In a crowded field, Prevention takes home the statuette.
– Paul Raeburn
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