Headlines

The Globe and Mail has this headline and teaser in their newsletter:

Patients wait as PET scans used in animal experiments

'This is absolutely the world upside down,' doctor says

Wow. Sounds terrible. Must read article, find out where animal experiments (and what kind?) are making patients wait for PET scan diagnoses.

Oh.

It's the governmental restrictions on who can and can't get a PET scan that are leaving the machines idle, so they're being pressed into use, instead.

In Canada, in fact, no other technology promises cancer patients such inequitable access as PET scanners, and, among provinces that have them, Ontario is the most restrictive of all. Its use of the scanners is so tightly controlled that when London doctors have been unable to fill their half of the PET/CT slots with cancer patients, researchers used the empty spaces to do experiments on laboratory-bred animals.

There is, of course, nothing untrue about the headline - but the implication is clear: animals - and animal experiments at that - are being given preference over people. And instead, the animal use is incidental. The headline could have read

Patients wait as PET scanners stand idle

which wouldn't have had quite the same impact.

It's all about selling the papers, after all.