News and statistics
In a story about the announcement of Pfizer’s inhalable insulin being approved by the FDA, there’s a chart similar to this one:
Source: National Diabetes Statistics, National Institutes of Health.
When Plagioclase’s mother read the article to me this morning while I was trying to read something else (a bad habit we all have in this house), she said “15% of diabetics don’t take their medicine.”
Where’d she get that? I thought she was better at statistics than that. And me, being pedantic, wanted to tell her so, until I read the whole article for myself. The last paragraph in our newspaper (under the byline of Andrew Bridges, Associated Press) reads “About 15 percent of diagnosed diabetics do not take the insulin or pills they should, according to American Diabetes Association estimates.”
Huh. This chart says, to me at least, that 15% of people diagnosed with diabetes don’t take any medicine at all (oral or injected). It could be for any reason, perhaps their diabetes is being treated with diet and exercise (always the first resort). Plagioclase’s mother didn’t misinterpret the chart — she simply read me the words of Mr. Bridges.
So I looked around online for other copies of the article, to see if our local rag inserted this statement, and nope, it didn’t; it’s part of the original syndicated story.
Then I thought, “maybe the American Diabetes Association uses some more up-to-date information, or has a different survey?” I surf over there, and go to their statistics page, and am offered a pdf that says exactly the same thing as the NIH website does. No big surprise as the fact sheet is put out jointly by “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the American Diabetes Association, and other partners.”
So I’m curious. Did Mr. Bridges misread the chart? Is he assuming that all diabetics must take medicine? Did he have information available to him that I can’t find? I’m not meaning to pick on Mr. Bridges — I’m sure he doesn’t know nor care that I noticed this discrepancy. But I do wonder how often this apparent lack of proper interpretation goes on in the newspaper. I (obviously) can look for corroborating or conflicting reports from other sources. Plagioclase’s mother (and others like her who don’t or won’t use the internet) can’t.
This is a little point that occurs late in an article, so in many cases it would likely be trimmed to fit the space. At what position in the article does it become important enough to get it right?
