With your team, discuss the headlines and research that the preceding feature focuses on. In order to make the discussion useful and relevant to your work:
- Have a look at the comment relating to the headline €Can coffee help you live longer?€. Do you think that drinking coffee causes us to live longer? What is the reduction in risk? What is the reduction in risk compared with other healthy living activities such as maintaining healthy weight, stopping smoking, etc?
- Can you identify an example of bad reporting of a health topic? And a good example?
- What makes for a piece of good reporting on health €“ and for a piece of bad reporting? Look at: www.researchtheheadlines.org/2015/11/27/talking-headlines-with-kevin-mitchell
- What are some of the common problems in bad health reporting? www.researchtheheadlines.org/2015/01/27/talking-headlines-prof-dorothy-bishop-onscience-in-the-media
- As the 'red meat' headline in our feature shows, processed meat was described by some media as being as dangerous as smoking. Is this right? Have a look at: www.researchtheheadlines.org/2015/10/30/does-red-meat-cause-cancer
- Several health headlines will have emerged since this feature was written. Can you identify some? Have your customers asked you about any of them? Have a look at: www.nhs.uk/news/Pages/NewsIndex.aspx.