The excitement has been growing to unbearable levels, with media moguls musing, reporters raiding refuse to find clues, and the American people pulsating with pounding heads after a night caressing a bottle of Irish whiskey.
I exaggerate, but someday you'll see: the media will tremble in fear at the prospect of receiving the just created "Perplexification Award," given to that source that best exemplifies the reality that parody is no longer possible in our sad, sad world.
Tuesday, March 14, 2006. The Health section. Front page. Two stories.
What catches the eye first? Sleeping Pill Causes Sleepwalking Subhead: "Reports raise questions about sleeping pill side effect. Is Ambien sleepwalking understated?"
Omigosh. People driving, drinking, getting arrested all while walking around in a Ambien-induced zombie-like state. Gadzooks! Call in the FDA. Call in the sleep police. Call in... oh, wait.
In 2004, over 24 million prescriptions for Ambien were written. Let's say that each contained 30 pills. That's 740 million times people took this sinister drug in 2004. Tinmothy Morgenthaler, a Mayo Clinic researcher, reported five cases fo sleepwalking in 2002. Nineteen cases were reported by one center last year. Since 1997, a whopping 207 sleepwalking incidents have been reported, most of which physicians can't link to Ambien. In fact, only 48 have been linked to this killer dru
Buried in the article are two interesting quotes. First, "None of these observations proves Ambien causes sleepwalking and questions about the side effect were not raised during the FDA's preapproval review of the scientific data." Second, "Helene Emsellem, medical director of the Center for Sleep and Wake Disorders in Chevy Chase, says she has seen no link between Ambien and sleepwalking in her practice, which is one of the largest of its type in the region. 'Nor do we see [Ambien] standing out as problematic' among other available sleep medications, she said."
Of course, the Post has horrible anecdotes about people doing terrible things which overwhelms any serious analysis, which we will now attempt.
It's well known that adverse incidents are under-reported, so let's assume a factor of 100. That is, there are 100 times more incidents that are reported. Okay, we get out our calculator and multipy 48 incidents times 100. Wait a minute. Got it, that's 4800 incidents over, say, 8 years or 600 a year. Wow! No wonder it got banner headlines. But wait. The drug is used 740 million times a year, which means your odds of sleepwalking from using the drug are 0.00008% or something like 1/80,000th of a percent. Another way of thinking about it is that if you take the drug 80,000 times, you have a 1% chance of sleepwalking.
That's what I call good medical reporting.
But, good people, that is not why the Post won the coveted Perplexification Award. On the very same page, the paper is beginning a series on how confusing and hysterical most media coverage of medical news is. They state it with more modesty than I:
The public gets inconsistent medical advice from the media.
How to respond? Well, "duh" is a good start. They admit the public is bombarded with tales from beyond Looking Glass. One day dimethyl doorknobs are good for you, the next day, they'll cause your fingers to turn green. Low-fat, high-fat. To implant or not to implant. Hormone replacement or tough it out.
It's actually a very good article. But where were the editors of this most esteemed of newspapers when they put this story below the fold on page 1 of the Health section and that moronic story about Ambien above the fold? Don't they read their own newspaper?
So, it is with great pleasure that I hereby award to The Washington Post the Perplexification Award, suitable for framing when I get around to making one up.
In Jamesons Veritas
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