Are medical shows good for our health?
By Flannery Dean   Printer-friendly page

Image courtesy of CTV


You wake up tired, put in a miserable day at work, fight rush-hour traffic and walk in the door to find your dog has dismantled the living-room sofa. By now your gastrointestinal tract is in shambles and you have a raging headache—time to reach for an aspirin and a little face time with McDreamy.

While a house call from Patrick Dempsey may not cure your headache, it can’t hurt.

If you suspect that primetime medical shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, House and ER are good for what ails you then you might be right—and not just because an hour spent gazing into McSteamy’s blue eyes has the same analgesic effect as a morphine drip.

“Television shows do make an impact on viewers,” says Kathy Le, who has a Masters degree in Public Health. She is the manager and project coordinator of Hollywood, Health & Society, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, operating from the USC Annenberg School's Norman Lear Center.

HH&S was designed to provide the entertainment industry with current and accurate information to support health storylines. Writers and producers derive the benefit of expert health consultation through individual meetings, group briefings and panel discussions.

HH&S also conducts research evaluating the impact of health storylines on audiences.

Le reports that the latest findings from the 2005 Porter Novelli HealthStyles survey reveal that more than half of regular primetime drama/comedy viewers (those who watch two or more times a week) learned something about a health issue or disease from a TV show. Nearly one-third of regular viewers took action as a result of a TV health storyline.

“Scripted formats, daytime drama, primetime drama, comedy and telenovela impact viewers in a different way than other formats,” says Le who cites Albert Bandura’s social learning theory to support her point concerning the importance of observational learning and behavioral modeling.

“Individuals are most likely to model the behaviour of individuals or fictional characters with whom they identify.”

When two powerful episodes concerning a young man with HIV aired on The Bold and The Beautiful, CBS ran the CDC’s toll-free help number for HIV-AIDS.

After a scene in which the character tells his girlfriend that he has HIV, viewers called the hotline in record numbers, achieving the largest spike in callers to the number that year, significantly higher numbers than were achieved in response to HIV stories told in documentary/news format on MTV, BET and 60 Minutes, each of whom also ran the 800-number.

“Audience members –about 4.5 million U.S. households, including more lower income, lower educated, minority female viewers—probably identified with the character's girlfriend and called for more information,” surmises Le.

HH&S has been able to measure the impact of TV shows on the general audience by doing specific follow up. Recently the project worked with writers on the primetime drama Numb3rs on CBS, to tell a story about organ donation and transplantation, one that had the potential to motivate viewers to become donors.

“Since we knew when the storyline was going to air, we were able to conduct an evaluation of the storyline by posting surveys on the show's website. After analyzing data from surveys answered before and after the episode aired, we found that 10 per cent of non-donors who saw the Numb3rs episode decided to become a donor,” reports Le.

When NBC’s ER featured a minor storyline concerning adolescent obesity, HH&S was able to discern self-reported change and modest impacts on knowledge, attitudes and practices among viewers, especially among young men, she advises.

TV medical dramas have come a long way since the days of Drs. Casey, Kildare and Welby who seemed to have an unreasonable fondness for “subdural hematomas.”

Most shows today feature real doctors as on-set advisors and writers showcase exotic and rare diseases for audiences no longer content with run-of-the-mill diagnoses. Bridging the gap between entertainment and information isn’t easy but recognizing its obligation to authenticity, for example, House’s official website also features story-related medical links.

Despite ongoing efforts to replicate real-life, TV medical shows fall short according to a recent article in Stanford Medical Magazine featuring the views of medical professionals who, while admittedly entertained by their show-biz counterparts, criticize the programs for their reliance on histrionics, sex, adrenaline and unrealistic outcomes.

The article also refers to information that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1996, which highlighted the dramatic difference in TV survival rates from CPR –better than two-thirds—as compared to real life, where an estimated 95 per cent perish.

And it’s worth considering that when medical professionals wrote in to the New York Times recently to express their opinions about the Stanford article, many of them said that NBC’s half-hour comedy Scrubs and not Grey’s Anatomy, House or ER, was the show that best represented what actually goes on in most hospitals—so maybe, you should focus on your TV doctor’s soothing symmetry of face and take his prescription with a pinch of salt.