On March 27th, 2018, a study in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports (which is linked to Nature) titled “Structure and Distribution of an Unrecognized Interstitium in Human Tissues” was published. However, you more than likely heard “Scientists say they discovered a ‘new organ’ in the body”.

What the authors of the paper are actually saying is that they think there needs to be a “novel expansion and specification of the concept of the human interstitium”. Basically, a system that we already knew was there should be reclassified. The paper does not say that the system should definitively be reclassified as an organ. What it does say is that researchers were able to discover new aspects of the interstitium that were previously unobserved because the interstitium has only ever been studied in fixed slides (not while it was present in living tissue)

But this doesn’t stop the Chicago Tribune from stating “The human body is full of surprises. The latest: A newly identified “organ” that might affect major diseases.”, or Fox News from printing “Scientists Say They’ve Discovered a New Organ That Might Explain How Cancer Spreads”.

I don’t want to come down too hard on these news reports because, ultimately, I think its great that we’re engaging as many people as possible about science and medicine. And if you read the articles themselves, they do report on the findings accurately, and include quotes from scientists and researches not involved in the study.

However, it is important to read any headlines about breakthroughs in medicine and science with a skeptical eye.

Here is another example. In 2008, The NY Daily News reported “Sugar as addictive as cocaine, heroin, studies suggest”. The article references a study in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 2008 called “Evidence for Sugar Addiction: Behavioral and Neurochemical Effects of Intermittent, Excessive Sugar Intake”.

The study discovered that rats go through neurological changes, and suffer from withdrawal symptoms after being fed high sugar diets, which is indeed similar to what happens when you’re addicted to nicotine or cocaine. But to say that sugar is as addictive to heroin and cocaine is a leap. Furthermore, the study was in rats, not humans. Scientific studies rarely make bold claims or even conclusions about the outcomes of their work. They usually present the methods, the study, and the result, but they rarely try and draw a conclusive link to anything. Studies are meant to be repeated. Only after many many repetitions of the same study using the same methodology but performed by different researches can we start to think about drawing conclusions.

The Mirror once reported that “Bacon gives kids cancer”. The first sentence in the article is “Children who eat bacon more than once a week raise their leukaemia risk almost 75 per cent, say researchers.”.

If you’re skeptical of this claim, you should be. This information comes from a single research study conducted on 145 Han Chinese leukemia patients in southern Taiwan. This should already be a red flag. There are so many external, genetic and environmental factors that cannot be controlled for in a study of people of a single ethnicity in a single place. There is nothing in the article specifically about bacon either. The Mirror just made that up.

The three examples are a bit extreme, but hopefully it gives you a nice inoculation against misleading news titles about medicine and science.

Stay skeptical my friends.