I

really get tired of writing about the lack of respect neuroendocrine cancer and carcinoid syndrome get from the national media.

But the people who write for the mainstream media and general interest magazines I can at least cut a little slack because they are not really medical professionals. They are generalists writing for an audience that averages–at best–a ninth grade reading level. It is easy, when you don’t know much about cancer or medicine, to see one tumor in the pancreas or the stomach as just pancreatic or stomach cancer. The nuances sometimes get lost in the simplifications made necessary by the speed with which most stories have to be written and by the dictum that a fifth grader may have to be able to make sense of it.

Still, it aggravates me because, as a former journalist and journalism teacher, the first thing I always demanded from myself–and from my students–is that the facts be right–that what we printed be accurate even when we were writing against a tight deadline. I write a piece here almost daily–and I try very hard to make sure that what I write is accurate and makes sense. When I have doubts, I ask someone with more experience or knowledge than I have before I hit the publish button.

But what really aggravates me is when someone who should know better gets things wrong.

And that is what happened on The Dr. Oz Show yesterday. They interviewed a patient who had NET. They included part of that interview on the air. But the part that mentioned NET ended up on the cutting room floor. And that turned the patient into just another stomach cancer patient.

That would be less of a problem for me if NET were a typical stomach or gastrointestinal cancer that was treatable with the normal surgery and standard radiation and chemo therapies. But NET is not a typical GI cancer. The hormones an NET produces complicate surgeries because of the possibility of carcinoid attacks. Normal radiation therapy is virtually useless because it attacks cells that are growing rapidly. Normal chemo therapy faces the same problem. How one handles metastases versus primary tumors is also different when you deal with an NET.

The Dr. Oz Show claims to be a program about medicine. When I have seen his shows in the past, I have taken his pronouncements seriously. Now I am not so sure I should have.

In the news media business, credibility matters. Whether Dr. Oz likes it or not, he is in the news business: he is delivering medical news. Thursday, he and his producers got it wrong.

I told my students that there would be times they got things wrong. It is an inevitable consequence of trying to work on a deadline. But I also taught them that when they got something wrong, they needed to run a correction and an apology–they needed to make things right and take responsibility for the error.

Dr. Oz owes us that.

(A tip of the hat to the Carcinoid Cancer Foundation for finding out what happened with the interview.)