Reporters are really good at worrying about the standards of other people’s professions. Their own? Maybe not so much. Take Washington Post reporter Joel Achenbach, who tells readers “Researchers are supposed to have what is known as ‘equipoise’ going into a trial.” Equipoise is a completely neutral attitude toward what a scientific trial may prove or disprove.
Achenbach’s Aug. 5, Post article frets over the “stubbornly ambiguous” research on the health benefits/drawbacks — and even the precise definition of — “moderate drinking.”
Ostensibly, the article is a lament that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) pulled the plug on the planned “10-year, $100 million Moderate Alcohol and Cardiovascular Health (MACH) trial, which started to enroll participants earlier this year. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health, sponsored the trial.”
Why did that happen? The NIH thought the alcohol industry had too much input, and found flaws in the study’s design. They weren’t confident in the researchers' equipoise.
That’s too bad. Things were looking up for the no-alcohol-ever side of the argument. Achenbach writes:
As reported in the Lancet earlier this year, a survey of the health of nearly 600,000 drinkers in 19 countries found that very moderate drinking — about one drink a day — lowers the rate of certain kinds of heart attacks but raises the risk of other cardiovascular problems. There’s no net benefit in life expectancy, the study found.
So that Lancet study contradicted previous research showing health benefits from moderate alcohol consumption. And it was reported with all the circumspect sobriety we’ve to to expect from the media: The BBC screamed “One drink a day ‘can shorten life.’” The Evening Standard blared, “Just one alcoholic drink a day will shorten your life, study shows.” The Guardian gasped, “Drinking is as harmful as smoking,” And The Washington Post, in an article by the same Joel Achenbach, “‘Moderate’ drinking guidelines are too loose, study says.”
There’s just one problem: the Lancet study was, in scientific parlance, crap.
Christopher Snowden of the Spectator definitively debunked its reputed findings back in April, noting that researchers left a significant group out of their calculations: non-drinkers.
“Instead of using non-drinkers as their baseline, they used the most moderate of moderate drinkers and buried the findings for non-drinkers in the appendix,” Snowden wrote. If you look at the data in the study and ignore the editorialising of its authors, the study doesn’t tell us anything we did not already know. Moderate drinking reduces mortality risk and is particularly good for the heart. Light drinkers have the best outcomes, but drinkers who consume double the 14 units recommended by the Chief Medical Officer do better than those who do not drink at all.”
Snowden also called out the media for its “lamentable” reporting, but placed the blame on the study’s authors and their press releases.
“None of them explained that the control group was made up of moderate drinkers rather than total abstainers. Nor did the abstract of the study, although the authors did find room in it to make another appeal to governments around the world to lower drinking guidelines …” he wrote.
He explained that “close reading” could have “led journalists to the truth,” but the Lancet likely knew journalists would “rely on abstracts and press releases.”
It’s been months since Snowden took the study to task. Yet, here’s Achenbach citing the flawed Lancet study (without mentioning them) in writing a story about a flawed research. Why?
Clearly, he’s not a tippler, and he doesn’t skimp on the gloom and doom: “Alcohol can be a killer. The CDC calculates that 88,000 Americans die annually from alcohol-related causes, which include automobile accidents, breast cancer and cirrhosis of the liver.” Not only that, “It impairs perception and slows reaction time. Those effects can increase the risk of accidents or make the intoxicated person more vulnerable to violence and abuse.”
So maybe — just maybe — Achenbach is getting his inner Carrie Nation on, equipoise be damned.
