There’s no such thing as a slow news day on the health beat. Even if there are no killer viruses on the loose, and no deadly bacteria spreading in the food chain, there is always “a new study” to report.

Every day we check science news sites, like this one, that give reporters advance notice about studies about to be published. It’s not unusual to see up to a hundred studies stacked like planes over an airport, each one hoping to land in the headlines, sometime over the next few days.

Research about chocolate and coffee tend to get in the news no matter what the finding.(iStock)

Experience tells me that if a study is about chocolate, coffee or red wine, it has an excellent chance of getting in the news no matter what the finding. It’s the same for studies in high profile journals, such as Nature, Science, Lancet, and certain conditions like breast cancer, Alzheimer’s, obesity, and autism. And if the study claims to have made a novel, ‘first ever’ discovery, then it will probably be in the news.

But what if a study found that most studies end up being wrong? Would that study make the news? Well, it happened. A paper with the startling title: “Why Most Biomedical Findings Echoed by Newspapers Turn Out to be False” was published a few weeks ago by a French research group. And no, that study did not make it into the headlines.

The researchers, lead by neurobiologist François Gonon, examined the way newspapers reported on a number of high profile studies on attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). They asked the question: do scientific claims reported in the media end up being proven true over time? Their answer: in most cases, no. Then they asked: do the media go back and set the record straight? No again.

In other words, we, in the media, make a big deal over a new research finding, but when it turns out to be less exciting, or even wrong after future research, we don’t tend to report that. ‘Never mind’ doesn’t usually make it into the news.