Research Article Gone Wrong

The story "Chemo May Raise Risk of Falls in Breast Cancer Survivors" by HealthDay was featured on Yahoo News-- for reasons I can't explain. The article was confusing, the scientific facts were displayed unappealingly if at all, and the findings of the research are muddled. The study doesn't appear to have done research on any control group of its own, so it relies on a statistic on "community-dwelling adults over 65 years old" as the control. The article doesn't mention the age or place of living of the chemo patients it studied aside from saying they are "postmenopausal". The article fails to attribute some sentences to a source, or elaborate on them. For example: "Balance was the only difference between breast cancer survivors who fell and those who did not."

I would have attributed everything included in the piece, and written about the conditions of the experiment. I also would have investigated whether or not it is accurate to compare the research to another seemingly incomparable control group. I would have also investigated what other factors could have led to falls in chemo patients.

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