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Supreme Court Reaffirms Affirmative Action Policies Institutions Grapple with New HIAA Regulations "Operation Tipoff 2" Bioterrorism Exercise Offers Educational Lessons Family Medicine: Trying to Fill the Ranks Current & Choice: 'Prime Time Innovations in Medical Education: The Arts as a Teacher A Word from the President: Educational Diversity is a Compelling Interest Viewpoint: Loan Help for Researchers
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Current & Choice: New ideas in education, research, and patient care'Prime Time Doctors'A new CD for first-year medical students explores MDs' portrayal in the mediaBy Michael G. Malloy A physician's certainty versus uncertainty. The ability to solve society's problems with a stethoscope around your neck. Malpractice concerns. Life in one hand and death in the other. These powerful and sometimes conflicting messages are all part of a new CD-ROM on how the media portray physicians. The CD will be given to all first-year medical students as part of their White Coat ceremonies, starting this summer. "Prime Time Doctors: Why Should You Care?" explores media images in television and movies, contrasting today's images with those of yesteryear, including a movie from the 1940s and TV shows from the 1960s to the present. The CD was developed by Joseph Turow, Ph.D., professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. Dr. Turow, author of Playing Doctor, a late 1980s look at media images of M.D.'s, said that at that time, many of the televised images showed almost unlimited resources for healthcare provision, with an acute-care focus to make for more interesting storylines. "Since then," he says, "I think doctor shows have tried to show more of a resource-dependent focus. The idea [of the CD] is to make these incipient physicians more sensitive to what's in their patients' heads." 20-minute presentationThe main part of the CD includes a 20-minute presentation of video images, with music and words flowing between the vignettes. "TV's doctor stories circulate powerful images," the text reads. "The patients you meet in the coming years may have doubts about you because of the doctors they see on prime time television. The aim of this presentation is to explore why that is, and suggest what you can do about it." The video clips begin with a scene from the 2000 television show "Gideon's Crossing," in which Dr. Ben Gideon (Andre Braugher) gives a mesmerizing, powerful speech to medical students, with intercut images of him, and students listening to him, in a large, open classroom. "A doctor is engaged in a kind of performance, in which every word, every gesture, every intonation, is carefully sculpted for the benefit of the patient. What you say will be evaluated, repeated, in phone calls 30 times over the course of the day, to friends, colleagues, relatives," he tells the students. "A doctor never expresses anger, plays favorites, inspires false hopes or unnecessary doubts. When you are feeling harried, exhausted, insulted, conflicted, turned on, put upon, pulled at, taken advantage of, or panicked -- keep it to yourself. This is what patients want, and have a right to expect: Someone on their side, fighting for them, a human being, without unkind feelings, who makes no mistakes." Other video clips explore today's doctor images versus those of the past. A clip from the 1940 film "Dr. Kildare's Strange Case" shows Dr. Kildare (Lew Ayers), after some initial uncertainty, decisively performing brain surgery, even though the patient has not given consent. "I take full responsibility," he says, taking the scalpel. This is contrasted with a scene from the long-running "ER" television series in which Dr. Peter Benton (Eriq La Salle) wants to do the same -- save a patient with AIDS who has been shot, even though colleague Dr. Cleo Finch (Michael Michele) tells him the patient wishes to die. Today's questions, the contrast shows, are less black-and-white than those of the past. Interactive Web siteBesides the interactive CD's 20-minute video-style presentation with words and pictures, the disk also contains some of Dr. Turow's previous writings on the subject, an index of medical TV shows by decade, and a Web site where students will be able to interact with each other by posting their reactions. Even though Dr. Turow and his colleagues did most of the work, it still cost $50,000 to produce the 21,000 copies of the CD. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) provided the funding for the project. Most of the money was spent on rights fees for some of the film clips used, according to David Morse, RWJF's vice president of communications. Morse says he came across Dr. Turow's work with the Kaiser Foundation on the media and doctoring, and "got to thinking we could package a CD with modern and not-so- modern physicians in the popular culture. I thought it would be useful and thought-provoking, and think the next step is to see how it takes with students." |
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