High‑reach popular medical books and media pieces that make clinical claims (about trauma, medication harms, developmental origins) should include a short, public provenance statement: key cited studies, study designs and limits, and a brief robustness note describing major alternative explanations. This would be a lightweight, mandatory disclosure for any health book or mass‑market medical claim that reaches X readership or sales thresholds.
— Requiring provenance would reduce the downstream policy and clinical harm produced when influential popular works misstate or overgeneralize weak evidence.
2026.01.05
100% relevant
Joseph Everett’s article points to van der Kolk’s bestseller (3 million copies, 37 languages) and a misused 1973 obstetric paper as a concrete example where a provenance box (study type, sample, follow‑up length) on the book’s claims would have immediately signaled weak support.
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