Extra!

The Strip is so happy that November has gone away. This prime cut loves sweeps, but after a month of the local television stations trying to scare the bejesus out of us, we're ready for TV news to go back to being mediocre.

For a few weeks, however, it's entertaining as hell to see the local helmet-hair contingent chasing auto mechanics and garbage collectors with hidden cameras to expose one major scandal after another. Meanwhile, we're told that our lives are being endangered at every turn, and we better watch at 10 p.m. to find out how our cell phone or that extra-large helping of french fries or the things we keep under the sink could be killing us.

Scaring viewers is just how local TV news works. They do it because it makes them money.

But what's The Kansas City Star's excuse?

The daily spent the month of November trying to terrify readers as if it, too, were competing in a sweeps period.

Of course, this is a pretty scary time for the liberal newspaper.

University of Missouri-Columbia professor Clyde Bentley says that on October 23, Star publisher Art Brisbane gave a talk at the school and reported that the poor economy was causing dire losses in the Star's ad revenue. Brisbane denied it when the Strip got him on the phone, and he refused to comment when the Strip asked what he had said. (Believe this cutlet, the current economy has been no picnic for the rest of the industry, including the rag you're holding in your hands.)

But on November 3, the Star got another fright: After slow but steady gains in circulation over the past three years, the latest six-month figures showed a sudden drop in readers. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Star's weekday circulation was down more than 6,000 readers to 267,273, a drop of 2.3 percent from the previous half-year. Sunday readership was down a similar amount.

Daily newspapers have been hemorrhaging readers for decades -- ten years ago, the Star's weekday circulation was about 25,000 subscribers higher in a town with 300,000 fewer people. But the Star, like others, had been rallying since September 11, 2001, when terrorism and then the war in Iraq boosted people's interest in current events.

But what do you do when even Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein become yesterday's news?

If you're the Star, you go tabloid!

Your Prescription Could Kill You!

The Star began its November terror campaign with an investigative package supplied by its parent company, Knight-Ridder, that promised to scare the crap out of anyone taking prescription medication. In the case of the Star's aging audience, that's just about everybody.

The series claimed that irresponsible doctors around the country were endangering the lives of patients by prescribing drugs for uses that hadn't been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Knight-Ridder had found 800 cases in which patients were seriously harmed last year by such "off-label" prescriptions; the series estimated that the actual number of such cases was closer to 8,000.

The paper ran several horror stories, including one about a pregnant woman who nearly needed a heart transplant after her quack doctor prescribed an asthma medicine to keep her from going into labor too early.

Makes you want to run for the medicine cabinet with a hose.

But wait a minute. Those 8,000 adverse reactions were out of 115 million off-label prescriptions last year. After the stories ran, an angry Huntington's disease researcher pointed out on his Web site what the Knight-Ridder reporters had conveniently left out: a 1 in 14,000 chance of disaster gets us into struck-by-lightning territory. In fact, patients taking off-label prescriptions were more likely to be killed in auto accidents last year than they were to be seriously harmed by their medication. And they were certainly luckier than the 100,000 people who had to be hospitalized -- and the 16,500 who ultimately died -- from complications arising from taking aspirin and other anti-inflammatory painkillers.

After the series ran, Star Managing Editor Steve Shirk got an earful from local physician Jeffrey Kaplan. The neurologist was upset that the alarmist series painted such a misleading picture of off-label prescribing, which turns out to be quite common and, like all medical procedures and medicines, is subject to some risk.

"We often use medicines that are not approved," Kaplan tells the Strip. "We have medicines that work very well and are very safe, and we're going to use them for off-label indications. Thank God the FDA doesn't practice medicine."

A classic example, Kaplan adds, is the situation with his patients who have painful neuropathy, the chronic pain experienced by people with diabetes and other ailments. "There's no FDA-approved medicine for it. One, we tell our patients to suffer, or two, we give them an anti-seizure medicine which is very effective but not FDA-approved [for painful neuropathy]. And the drug company has no incentive to approve it for this use, since it would cost about a billion dollars for FDA approval -- and I'm not exaggerating."

Local cardiologist Mike Farrar gives another example. He prescribes an off-label medicine to postoperative bypass patients not only because it's more effective than the FDA-approved drug but also because Farrar doesn't like the side effect the FDA drug sometimes produces -- sudden death.