On a late-August morning in western New Hampshire, a group of 25 journalists, physicians, and researchers gathered at Dartmouth not for a typical academic conference but for something quieter and more urgent: the annual Medicine in the Media workshop, a four-day gathering designed to help health reporters survive and thrive in an age flooded with misinformation and distrust. Since the early 2000s,this workshop has offered a rare sanctuary where storytellers who cover medicine can slow down, compare notes, and sharpen the skills their craft demands. The program was organized by Steven Woloshin, a professor of health policy and clinical practice at the Geisel School of Medicine, whose career has been devoted to making medical evidence more clearand honest for everyone from doctors to the public. Financial support came from Arnold Ventures, based in Houston, along with Geisel,Dartmouth,andDartmouth Health, allowing participants to attend free of charge. The journalists in attendance represented some of the most important voices in American health news—NPR,theNew York Times,theJournal of the American Medical Association,andSTAT News—as well as independent and university-affiliated outlets dedicated to health and medicine. They had come from across the country to wrestle with an uncomfortable question:in a media environment where a single viral post can outperform years of careful research, how can a journalist persuade anyone that their reporting is accurate, fair, and worth trusting?
The urgency of that question was made plain in the workshop’s opening session, held in theairy Irving Institute for Energy & Society. Jennifer Hunt, dean of the Geisel School of Medicine and chief academic officer at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, welcomed the group by naming the central tension of modern science communication:we now live, she said,“in a world of instantaneous proclamations, anecdotes that are co-opted into evidence,and opinions that look and sound and masquerade like science.” Her words hung over the coming hours,a reminder that the careful, slow methods of peer review and replication—developed over decades—are increasingly at odds with the demand for immediate answers. That spring,thePew Research Center had released a survey of 5,000Americans, and it painted a sobering picture:while most people said they trusted their own personal physicians, more than half were unsure which news sources to trust when trying to untangle conflicting health claims. Woloshin, in his own introduction, offered neither easy reassurance nor sweeping condemnation.“Develop and employ the critical thinking and quantitative skills that you need to evaluate health messages,”he urged.“Donot accept things at face value. Ask hard questions,and learn to identify the health claims and evidence behind them.” It was a straightforward prescription,but one that requires constant practice—and exactly what the next three days would be devoted to.
The workshop itself has a history as attentive to its own roots as to the future. It was originally funded by theNationalInstitutesofHealth, and after a few years Woloshin and his late colleague Lisa Schwartz—a professor at The Dartmouth Institute and of Community and Family Medicine, who died in2018—took over running it. Schwartz’s influence remains woven into the program, a legacy of intellectual rigor and compassion for patients navigating an often bewildering system. This year’s agenda mirrored the breadth of contemporary health care reporting. Participants dug into artificial intelligence’s potential to transform diagnosis and treatment; shifts in federal vaccine policy and public health regulations; the consequences of stagnant government research funding; proposed federal cuts toMedicaid; how to tell stories from rural America, where health care access is frequently fragile; and even the strange new world of AI large language models used to generate text—both in journalism and in medical misinformation. Throughout, the emphasis was not on memorizing answers but on building a portable toolkit:how to read a study, how to distinguish correlation from causation, how to ask better questions of experts, and how to translate statistical nuance into language a reader can actually use.
A recurring theme was the media’s persistent tendency to swing between two poles:exaggerated fear and unrealistic promise. Woloshin illustrated the problem with a striking example:a social media influencer’s paid endorsement for a migraine drug that claimed to completely eliminate pain within an hour. It was a perfectly polished, emotionally resonant piece of content—and it was nonsense.“I’ve been a doctor for a long time,”Woloshin told the group.“I’ve never seen it.” Such moments underscored a deeper lesson:health information, especially on social platforms, is engineered to grab attention, not to reflect the messy, incremental, often uncertain reality of medicine. The workshop pushed back against that pressure, encouraging journalists to sit with ambiguity andand to resist the lure of the perfect anecdote. Discussion also probed more subtle hazards:understanding the difference between perceived, actual,and relative risk;the harmsthat can come from overdiagnosis, when tests uncover conditions that would never have caused illness;the emerging, still uncertain field of psychedelic-assisted therapy;and the way well-meaning reporters can inadvertently amplify hype simply by repeating a researcher’s press release without independent scrutiny.
On the conference’s second day, journalists gathered for a panel discussion andQ&A focused on one of the most pressing, underserved beats in American medicine:rural health care. The conversation was moderated byJacquesSteinberg,a formerNew York Timesjournalistand a Dartmouth alum,and featured a group of leaders deeply familiar with the territory:Joanne Conroy,CEO of Dartmouth Health;Jennifer Hunt, the medical school dean;RoyHerbst,recently named director of the Dartmouth Cancer Center;andAmberBarnato,director of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. Conroy set the scene with a stark statistic:twenty percent of the U.S. population lives in rural areas.“And they want to know how they can stay healthy,”she said, emphasizing thatimproving rural health isn’t only about hospitals or clinics;it means addressingbasic barriers like transportation—which can determine whether someone can even get to an appointment. Herbst added a crucial equity dimension:the rise of personalized, precision medicine has created remarkable advances in cancer treatment, but those advances mean nothing if they never reach patients at the point of care. “We have to make sure that advances that we have get to patients,”he said. Barnato then introduced a more sobering layer:the nearly $1trillion in projected federal cuts to health care spending, including reductions toMedicaidandtheSupplementalNutritionAssistanceProgram, orSNAP. Many core services that communities rely on—such as substance use disorder treatment programs—are disproportionately funded throughMedicaid, and if those funds wither, the effects will be felt far beyond the literal beneficiaries. Barnato cautioned that states will respond unevenly:“There’s going to be a huge heterogeneity in the way states manage the new requirements and the changes in funding from the federal government.” Wealthier states, she noted, will have far greater capacity to absorb the cuts while preserving community services, widening already deep geographic and economic divides in health access. For journalists, the challenge becomes how to localize these enormous policy stories—to show what a line in a federal budget actually means for a woman in a small town trying to find substance use treatment, or for a family deciding whether to drive eighty miles for cancer care.
The final days of the workshop were marked by a quieter kind of transformation:journalists finding community, and with it, renewed clarity. RodMcCullom,a freelance journalist and Knight Journalism Fellow atMIT whose work has appeared inScientificAmericanandMITTechnologyReview, appreciated the chance to simply sit next to his peers.“It was great to be around a table and bounce ideas off each other,”he said. For him, the conference reinforced something he already suspected but needed to hear:“Scientists and researchers and journalists often use jargon or acronyms because they’re easier. But I think sometimes, as journalists, we fall into the trap of trying to sound too smart.” The remedy, he suggested, is radical simplicity:clear, easy, accessible language that respects readers rather than impressing them. Karen Fisher,a freelance journalist fromNew Mexico, arrived with a self-described desire for stronger diagnostic skills.“We don’t always have the tools to assess what’s trustworthy and what’s not,”she said.“We do the best with the information we have.” After four days of listening to medical and scientific experts explain how to decipher data, she left with something more practical:a better sense of how to“look at a study and know what’s statistically significant, and what’s not.” In an era when public confidence in institutions, media,and even science itself is eroding, that may sound like a modest achievement. But the journalists who attended the Medicine in the Media workshop know better. The ability to ask the next question, to recognize the difference between a promising preliminary finding and a proof, totransmitcomplexity without false certainty—these are not glamorous skills,but they are foundational to a healthy democracy. Armed with sharper tools,and supported by a network of colleagues who share their commitment, thosescattered across newsrooms around the country left Dartmouth ready to do the hardest, most important work in medicine:helping people make sense of their own health in a world that will only grow more confusing.