I got my August issue of Glamour magazine in the mail last week. This is not something newsworthy in and of itself, but the cover promised a story of another way that doctors suck, so I obviously flipped right to page 86.
If you read this blog and can comprehend context clues, you probably know by now that I'm overly sensitive to doctor-bashing, especially the variety that ends up in a women's magazine that has Vanessa Hudgens squishing kittens on the cover (poor kittens, BTW). Sometimes it's justified, but the vast majority of the time it's overly-dramatic hogwash.
ANYWAY, the article tells the tale of women who aren't properly diagnosed with various womanly diseases. What blows my mind about the story isn't that I think the information presented about misdiagnosis was false, but rather that it's so twisted and diluted and dumbed-down.
Oprah, Cosmo and WebMD (among others) are usurping the expertise of trained physicians and are changing the way healthcare is delivered by creating an erroneously educated public. A headshot and a byline are seemingly the most effective ways to get medical knowledge across. White coats and lots of schooling can't compete with the Internet or Oprah's producers in the snazzy department. And the scariest part of all - the masses eat this shit up!
Journalists need to be held more accountable when reporting health-related concerns. Fact check. Do a literature search. Call more than one expert. Present multiple opinions, pros, cons. Help to create an informed patient, not one who is biased and full of mistrust. Heathcare in America is in shambles, and an ignorant, self-intitled public is part of the problem.
There are a couple of things that came to mind when I read this.
ReplyDelete1) The problem with journalism is the same problem with documentary filmmaking. The info presented in the piece is going to be 100% biased, and therefore just some asshole's opinion. The depressing part is that the general public believe everything they read when it's presented as truth, which is part of the reason that I still want to punch Michael Moore, that fat piece of shit.
2) There's this Louis CK thing where he's talking about how lame the doctor was in the nursing home where they were keeping his grandmother. When he told the doctor that she had suddenly lost vision, the doctor replied with, "Well, there's probably a bunch of tumors in her effing head."
Seriously, though, you should hate the general public for believing the shit in magazines. Just saying.