Question: What has been the best headline to investigate about?

David Nunan answered on 8 Nov 2015:

That’s a really good (and tricky) question Poppy!

There’s loads but perhaps one that comes to mind is this headline about exercise and depression which I saw in a paper on the train to work: “Exercise ‘no benefit in’ depression”.

When I got to work I checked online and even the BBC reported this headline: “Exercise ‘of no help’ for depression, research suggests.

So I found the study that all the headlines were based on and read it very thoroughly. It was actually a study that was done very well by the scientists but the problem was the way the findings were interpreted by the media.

What the scientists did was give one group of patients with depression very detailed advice about how to exercise and then checked to see if the patients reported that their depression had improved or got worse a few months later. They compared the answers from this group of patients to the answers from a group of patients who did not get any advice about exercise.

The scientists reported that there was no difference in depression levels between the two groups when the study was completed. So in other words the very detailed advice and support to start exercising was no better for depression levels than not having that advice.

Can you see the problem then with the media headlines? They don’t reflect what the study actually did very well do they? This is very important. I have a doctor colleague who told me that some of his patients have come to him after reading the headlines and asked if they should not bother with doing exercise anymore!

So I wrote to the journal that published the paper about the study (it was the British Medical Journal – one of the best medical journals in the world) and told them that I wasn’t happy with the headlines coming from the paper. Luckily, so did a lot of other scientists.

Interestingly, when I went back the the BBC website later that day their headline from the morning had changed to this “Depression: Exercise advice questioned when added to standard treatments” (you can have a look for yourself here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18335173)

The BMJ article also had to make a few changes as well.

This was perhaps on of my best examples and I use this in teaching all the time.