Medicine & Media : A Bumpy Marriage

That medical gossip makes interesting news was clearly evident when the headlines and front pages of major dailies blared about Mr Amitabh Bachhan’s intestinal diverticuli or Mr Manmohan Singh’s blocked coronaries, dispeling the daily din and clamour of politicians and criminals to corners of its remote pages. While politics is their staple diet, a glance through the pages of the morning papers or magazines display a good dose of medical news, be it beauty tips, cancer scares or hot news from the oven of medical research.

Of the several types of health news, “tragic tales” of individuals who have lost their limbs, livers or lives due to medical negligence is the type of story that the novice reporter feels most excited to file. “Happy case reports” of how a child from Pakistan successfully underwent a heroic corrective surgery for a rare heart disease, and went happily back home, comes next. It brings with it a “feel good factor” and comes as a whiff of freshness amidst the scandals, murders and political rallies.

A new facilitiy inaugurated in a hospital, is another type of news that the reader may find useful. The focus is often however on the celebrity who inauguarated the facility and the moronish words he uttered in the function, rather than the utilty of the machine, experience of those likely to operate it.

“Scary news”, the fourth category is exemplified by reportage on the spread and risks of Swine Flu that made many people panic. Reports of medicines being in short supply added helplessness to fear, and made people feel doomed.

Celebrity news is the most exciting with readers devouring every single detail of what is printed or said. Every reader new about lethal drug cocktails in the aftermath of Michael Jackson’s death, about schizophrenia that took the toll of the once pretty Parveen Babi or about kidney transplantation after Mr Amar Singh’s return to the TV studios.

Profiling doctors and hospitals is another kind of coverage that sometimes borders on promotion. The doctors and hospitals, usually private, must be engaging well with the media as only heart-touching stories of success and greatness seem to find their way in the pages, while audits and failures never do. And as public opinion is craftily shaped, readers often travel long distances in search for the dream destination.

The most impact of media that I have seen, has been patients of Hepatitis B or C who were proclaimed untreatable by their physicians, come to my clinic with newspaper cuttings and renewed hopes of cure. “Till we read this, we were just waiting for death” said one with tears in her eyes. From being the society’s conscience keeper to a harbinger of change, that is the positive power of the media. Three cheers!

As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) dated 1 august, 2010.