GoodBehavior: They Only Play One on TV

They Only Play One on TV


	GoodBehavior! archives

A B O U T_U S

The Center for the Advancement of Health translates to the public the latest research on prevention, chronic disease management and health care, with an emphasis on how social, behavioral and economic factors affect illness and well-being. The Center is an independent nonprofit corporation that receives core funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and The Annenberg Foundation.

D I S C O N N E C T

A new systematic evidence review from the Cochrane Collaboration finds that it is just as safe and also much cheaper to give vitamin B12 in high doses to older people by mouth instead of by intramuscular injections. But only in Sweden and Canada is the oral version the norm. Despite the finding, confirming previous studies, author Josep Vidal-Alaball, M.D., says doctors may not prescribe oral dosing because they don’t know of the option or still think it is not effective.

T O P_M E D I A_H I T S

A small Canadian study in the
American Journal of Health Promotion found that office workers receiving e-mail reminders about exercise and diet improved their attitude and behavior about their own health. The Health Behavior News Service story about it won play in the Los Angeles Times, the Omaha World-Herald, the Hindustan Times, Reuters, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., KLAS-TV in Los Angeles and 26 other media worldwide.

Television has given us some great doctors over the years – Dr. Kildare, Marcus Welby, John Carter, Gregory House. Their value was giving us good fiction based on fact.

Now, television is giving us bad facts based on fiction from a new set of doctors – people like Dr. Phil, who believes “what were you thinking?” is a substitute for therapy; “Dr.” Tom Cruise, who has “read the literature” and is thus qualified to pronounce that psychiatry is bunk; and “Dr.” Don Imus, the esteemed science broadcaster and recreational drug expert who uses his programs to cast doubt on the safety of childhood vaccines.

But he is a mere intern compared to the genius “Dr.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has mounted a campaign to convince people there is a corporate-government-medical conspiracy to poison children by polluting them with vaccines that used to contain the mercury-based preservative thimerosal. Dr. Kennedy’s scholarly article appeared in a recent edition of the venerated medical journal Rolling Stone.

Unfortunately, the failure of science to adequately explain itself gives succor to the talk show Babbitts who take advantage of a public inadequately educated that science is an undertaking at once ambiguous, frustrating and self-correcting.

The Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported that almost one-third of major findings in a 14-year period were either reversed by later studies or found to be weaker than first thought. Another prestigious journal, The Lancet, is changing the standards for articles it will accept, now requiring investigators to say why their research is necessary, to summarize previous studies on the subject and to explain what they are finding that is similar or different.

The lesson we can take from both JAMA and The Lancet is pretty clear: The things about health that we do know with relative certainty we can only know from the systematic and cumulative review of scientific findings over time. That lesson, however, is still waiting for a reception on Capitol Hill, where the Senate majority leader, a real doctor, makes diagnoses based on television pictures.

One of the most powerful members of the House of Representatives, “Dr.” Joe Barton, R-Texas, chairman of the Commerce and Energy Committee, is investigating – some of his colleagues call it “intimidating” – the researchers who established that global warming is a peer-reviewed, replicable, generally accepted scientific fact. Another member of Congress, “Dr.” Randy Neugebauer, also of Texas, is trying to kill two individual NIH peer-reviewed behavioral science grants because he doesn’t think they are scientifically worthy.

So, while there are a few good fictional doctors on TV, there may be too many such doctors in the House.