Medical & Health News Reporting

This skill specializes med-news-reporter for the medical/health beat. Read med-news-reporter first for the general 6-step workflow (type selection, material audit, fact-check, balance, ethics, literacy). This file adds health-specific discipline on top.

Overview

Distilled from health-journalism curricula at Stanford Medicine+Muse, Johns Hopkins SFDH, AHCJ (Association of Health Care Journalists), Columbia Mailman, NTU Public Health, and Taiwan health-media ethics standards. Covers five sub-types: research breakthroughs / public-health alerts / drug approval / health policy / patient stories. Core challenge: translating statistical evidence for public understanding without misrepresenting risk or false certainty.

IRON LAW: Relative Risk Without Absolute Risk Is Misleading

Every medical claim in the form "X% increase/decrease in risk" MUST cite
absolute baseline numbers: baseline incidence, NNT (Number Needed to Treat),
absolute risk reduction, or absolute risk change. "50% reduction in risk of
heart attack" is meaningless without "from 4 in 1000 to 2 in 1000 per year".
LLM default: lead with the relative risk (sounds dramatic), omit baseline.
Readers then overestimate the clinical significance. Override that default
by naming the denominator first, then the percentage.