Recent as in 4 Years Ago

Recent is becoming a red flag on the Internet. This morning I sat down with coffee to check the Google News alerts--like many people I've set up a few specific interests--and one prominent headline published yesterday by the Cleveland Clinic looked interesting: Is Your Child Being Bullied Because of Food Allergies? 5 Tips.

Notice how the piece frames this as a growing problem and presents recent evidence from a respected scientific journal:

"Bullying around food allergies is a growing problem, Dr. Hong says. A recent study published in the journal Pediatrics found about one-third of children with food allergies experienced bullying because of their medical condition."

Except that's misleading. Click in on that linked study and read the date.

The Cleveland Clinic presents no other evidence. So if you have followed the topic for a few years and were worried about bullying nearly half a decade ago, you can come away from this piece thinking that all the awareness and outreach of recent years has been worse than useless.

If that were the most recent science available on the topic of allergies and school bullying it might be easier to excuse. I would love to learn about this piece published in the journal Pediatric Allergy, Immunology, and Pulmonology in March 2016--but unfortunately I don't have the subscriptions to access it. Another interesting study is this review article also from 2016, but Elsevier is the publisher so all I can access is the abstract. A similar dilemma surrounds this other research from 2015.

Actually all Cleveland Clinic has done is recycled an old study and posted a few quotes from one of their own staff physicians--identifying her by her professional title but, again, leaving the reader to to the legwork in discovering that there might be a tiny conflict of interest. And the study they cite happens to be the most recent thing where the full text is available for free online (which raises doubts how many journal subscriptions they maintain).

To be fair, the clinic itself is probably fine and bullying probably hasn't disappeared. I'm challenging their social media strategy, not their competence. Every organization likes to get into Google News.

But telling people their problems have worsened and massaging the evidence to support the claim isn't the best thing to do. Especially when the target audience has plenty of well-founded worries and sometimes deals with complaints that call them over-cautious.

In the old Disney film Snow White there's a scene where the dwarfs want to eat a pie, and when they're asked how long it's been since they washed their hands they try to evade scrutiny by saying "Recently!"

The hands, when checked, are quite dirty.

This hasn't been the only occasion this month where I've seen website claim something was recent as a way of fudging so long ago that it may have lost relevance. The other time had nothing to do with healthcare, though.

I hope that bullying has been on the decline with better awareness and response strategies. But until sites disclose specific dates I'm going to make it a habit of clicking links to check how recent? One expects that sort of evasion in cartoon comedy. It's a disappointment when this happens in settings that aspire to be more serious.