Media Hype and Medical Reality in Asthma Treatments

You must never take what the generic press says about healthcare at its face value. The jobs of writers who work for the major papers is to bring in reads by the bucket full with snappy and often outrageous headlines. This is great for their incomes and helps them to stay afloat in an economy which is becoming more and more hostile to print media, what it’s not great for is you, the reader. They don’t lie, they’d never get away with that. What they do is pick a factor in a story which may not be entirely relevant and blow it out of all proportion.

An example of this is the Guardian telling the world that asthma treatments may make the condition worse. While this is broadly true, what their article forgot to mention was that this was only true of people in a certain genetic group and that those people had had new treatments either in use or under development. This little  titbit actually changes the shock which is generated by this article, it’s not nearly as worrying or horrifying as they’d have us believe.
Essentially certain asthmatics don’t react to traditional treatment, these are general in a specific genetic group. Those in this group are given more potent treatments instead and there’s a  drug called salmeterol which is one of these treatments. It’s salmeterol which has raised a little concern but doctors and researchers have started to use a different drug called montelukast in several studies and so far the results have been very positive.

Given a few months montelukast could enter the group of widely accepted asthma treatment and as such, it’ll help to make those asthmatics in that specific genetic grouping much healthier.

That is the story as this writer sees it, not a negative thing but a positive one. Just another way in which healthcare services will adapt to ensure all patients receive the treatment which is best for them.