Over-Optimistic Portrayal of Life-Supporting Treatments in Newspapers and Internet

Several Taiwanese researchers have just published a new study:  "Over-Optimistic Portrayal of Life-Supporting Treatments in Newspapers and on the Internet:  A Cross-Sectional Study Using Extra-Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation as an Example."



From the article's conclusion:  Newspapers and the Internet have the potential to influence patients' knowledge and attitudes toward medical decision-making by providing over-optimistic medical information through the following ways: 

1. First, the mass media tend to attract the public’s attention by reporting the positive outcome of an important breakthrough in clinical medicine


2. Second, the mass media tend to report patients who survive to hospital discharge, rather than those who die during hospital stay


3. Third, the survived patients and their stories are more likely to be duplicated in newspapers and on Internet web pages than those who die during hospital stay.

Newspaper readers and Internet users may, therefore, mistakenly believe that ECMO can usually rescue patients from all life-threatening conditions.  However, ECMO, similar to other aggressive LST such as CPR, is ethically appropriate to be initiated on patients with reversible diseases, not on those with irreversible diseases.