by Heather Draper
For the manufacturers of melatonin, 1995 was a very good year.
The "miracle pill" has gone from the pages of rather obscure scholarly health journals to the front-and-center of mainstream publications. The Nov. 6 Newsweek cover touted, The Melatonin Craze: Sleep, Jet Lag and Aging: The Selling of a Natural Wonder Drug, and inside was a glowing article about the health fad of the hour.
Strikingly, that cover story was a follow up to a lengthy feature on melatonin the magazine had published in August. But Newsweek is hardly alone in heralding the arrival of melatonin on the medicine-chest scene. Publications ranging from The New York Times to the Los Angeles Times to the Chicago Tribune to Prevention magazine have all offered essentially positive articles on the "wonder drug." Melatonin even got its 15 minutes of fame on ABC-TV's 20/20 in November. And that's not to mention the several best-selling books now available preaching the virtues of melatonin.
This is all heady stuff for a heretofore little noticed hormone that is secreted nightly by the body's pineal gland, located in the center of the brain. Two years ago, melatonin was mainly the subject of polite conversation between business travelers swapping jet-lag cures. Now melatonin has been reported to not only ease the effects of jet lag, but to slow the ravages of aging and bolster the immune system. Even more "miraculous"--short-term studies have indicated that melatonin appears to have only minor, if any, side-effects. And now after word-of-mouth discussions and myriad media reporters about its yet unproved benefits--including better sex--health-food stores are finding that melatonin demand is outstripping supplies.
Coverage of this craze is a textbook case of how the media's big guns can pick up on a few positive medical studies and, seemingly overnight, create--and then sustain--a national mania. It also shows how normal and healthy competition among journalists to either be the first with these stories, or to find some new angle, can lead to internecine bickering and finger-pointing, as well as "herd" coverage. And yet again, this is another story that underscores the powerful grip that the Baby Boom generation has on the nation's media. For a pill-popping Now Generation degenerating into a pill-popping Then Generation, this is a product-story with great resonance--a natural, harmless chemical that combats the ravages of time.
Melatonin "hits on a lot of hot-button topics like anti-aging, sleeping better and helping sexual performance," notes Bob Condor, personal-health writer at the Chicago Tribune, who wrote about melatonin in September.
The media's anointment of melatonin as a "wonder drug" is a blueprint for how medical news can make its way from university laboratories and scholarly journals on to the cover of Newsweek and become a segment on 20/20. And it raises such questions as: What makes some health research studies sexier than others? And what role do the scientists, universities and their public-relations staffs play in adding fuel to a health-craze fire?
Although many reporters profess that they covered the story for very justifiable reasons, a herd mentality is often a factor that motivates reporters to cover the latest health trends. Even those journalists who scoff at Newsweek's coverage can't ignore it--its covers get the attention of editors at competing publications.
And in journalism, "everybody reads everybody else," adds Greg Gutfeld, senior writer for Men's Health magazine. "One tiny study can just snowball." The first reporters to cover such stories--Mr. Gutfeld's story appeared in Rodale Press' Prevention magazine in late 1993--gain some satisfaction and bragging rights in knowing others have followed them. Mr. Gutfeld believes that other health reporters are getting their story ideas from the Rodale publications he has written for, and melatonin is a prime example.
He credits his early interest in melatonin to--of all things--press releases. "Certain universities are getting better at promoting themselves and at sending out press releases," Mr. Gutfeld admits. "Some journalists just throw them out. I read all of them." He named University of California-San Francisco, Stanford and Penn State as some of the colleges that he thinks do a good job of promoting themselves and their research.
Melatonin research has been going on at several institutions for many years, so no one laboratory can claim credit of the discovery of its reported benefits. But word spread quickly early in 1994, at least among insomniacs, after neuroscientist Dr. Richard Wurtman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences saying that melatonin, even in small doses, dramatically reduced the time it took volunteers to fall asleep--even in the middle of the day.
Although Mr. Gutfeld's Prevention article appeared in late 1993, the story didn't begin to gather momentum until March 2, 1994, when Business Wire issued a press release about Interneuron Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Lexington, MA, licensing the MIT patent rights for melatonin to treat sleep disorders. A related story went out over The Associated Press wire the next day, which started the melatonin snowball rolling. The August Newsweek article turned the media snowball into a full-fledged avalanche.
New York University sociology professor Dorothy Nelkin, author of Selling Science and The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon, believes that "press agentry" is often what initially "sells" scientific research to the media and, in turn, the public.
"Journalists tend to follow press packets," claims Ms. Nelkin, who has done academic research on science communications for several years. "There is a certain vulnerability among reporters to press agentry because often these topics are very complex and they (reporters) don't have much time to do research. That makes them very vulnerable to their sources."
She cites pharmaceutical manufacturers as some of the most skilled at getting the word out. "Pharmaceutical products are often promoted by PR people who have a good command of how to package information for the press," Ms. Nelkin contends.
The down side of that, she says, is that makes of these products don't necessarily have to prove to the media that their products actually work because "the media will promote it because they think it's what people want to hear."
Reporters who have written about melatonin at various times along the media "snowball" say they were attracted to the story for different reasons, including press releases, reader interest and even their own healthy, journalistic skepticism. "At first it was just word-of-mouth about a natural product. People are enamored of that," Mr. Gutfeld explains.
However, many health reporters grudgingly--and not always flatteringly--admit that the August Newsweek article was the hypodermic needle that mainlined melatonin into public discourse. Other mainstream publications had beaten Newsweek to the punch on at least parts of the melatonin research being conducted, such as studies showing that it was helpful in easing jet lag. But those reports just didn't have the impact of a Newsweek cover story.
"There had been research on melatonin for years, but no one had really done an overview of that research," says Newsweek health and science writer Geoffrey Cowley, who was the lead reporter for both articles.
The Tribune's Mr. Condor says he wrote about melatonin in September for contrarian reasons: "Some medical practitioners, both alternative and mainstream, if you will, were noting that if the body doesn't produce as much melatonin at age 50, maybe there was a reason for it," he says. "That was intriguing to me."
Shari Roan, personal health writer for the Los Angeles Times who wrote a melatonin feature last October, admits she jumped on the melatonin media bandwagon fairly late in the game, but says her "tardiness" was intentional. "I'm very nervous handling these stories," she confesses. "I shy away from them unless the consumer trend is so overwhelming that it really needs to be written about." But she admits she couldn't stay away from the melatonin story: "It was appealing to me because consumers are going to wild over it. It necessitated a story from that point of view."
She's not so sanguine about Newsweek's handling of the fad. "It was sort of a rare diversion for that magazine to go about doing a piece like that," Ms. Roan assets. "It's so rare in medical writing that you can take any one single product or development and say all positive things about it. There's usually some kind of risk or some kind of caution or caveat. And certainly there is with melatonin."
She adds that she thought the Newsweek article was "appalling" and a "disservice" to readers because it "gushed" about melatonin without reporting the caveats. "I hate to criticize good journalistic publications, and Newsweek certainly is one," Ms. Roan says. "But the cover is now being reprinted and run on store displays for melatonin. I think that goes to show you how it (the magazine) embraced melatonin. I thought that was truly a disservice."
Newsweek's Mr. Cowley defends both his initial article in August and the follow-up cover story in November. He admits his first article was "very optimistic and very positive, but rightfully so. I wasn't saying it (melatonin) was a guarantee of anything, all I was saying was that there has been a tremendous amount of animal research on melatonin taking place. And I said that nobody knows how all of this will pan out."
He thinks that being the first large, mainstream publication to offer an overview on melatonin research set Newsweek up for criticism from other journalists. "When somebody else does it first, the second best thing is to come back and be more authoritative," Mr. Cowley notes. But, he adds, the tone of some subsequent articles implied that Newsweek "downplayed" the possible negative aspects of melatonin and "that's simply a bum rap. I didn't do that."
Despite the finger-pointing and oneupsmanship that typically accompanies media fad stories, such stories come and go quickly, because often the product does not live up to the customer's expectations (see echinachea, chromium, mushroom tea, etc.) Today's miracle cure often becomes tomorrow's bloodletting--a medical method one looks back on with a touch of bewildered amusement.
But the Tribune's Mr. Condor predicts that melatonin may have a lengthier stay in the sun. That's because there are several books out about the hormone, he says, and "books on a subject give a bit of permanence to whatever the story is . . . Those kinds of things give news stories a boost." He adds that he thinks it would be "unfortunate if this story dies off because I think there is value in having it front and center. People will ask, 'Does this really work?' It applies a sort of test of skepticism to the science already out there."
Mr. Cowley, whose work is at the very heart of melatonin madness, says that just because Newsweek contributed to putting melatonin in the limelight doesn't mean it shouldn't have done a follow-up story in November. "I don't think we lit a fire just to go back and cover it," he maintains. "It was a legitimate story to go back and chronicle the social phenomenon."
Mr. Cowley's initial interest in melatonin may have been purely academic, but his coverage has led him to a more personal finding--as a sleep enhancer, melatonin works for him. "I started trying it as an experiment," he explains. "I found out it improved my sleep a little bit, so I've been taking it ever since."
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Heather Draper is senior editor of TJFR Health News Reporter. Reprinted from the January 1996 issue of TJFR Health News Reporter, published monthly by the TJFR Publishing Co., 545 North Maple Ave., Ridgewood, NJ 07450. Copyright 1996 TJFR Group, Inc.