There’s a major problem with shows hosted by medical professionals. On the one hand, viewers are encouraged to believe that due to the professional credentials of the host, any discussion of a complicated topic treated on that show is going to meet some kind of high professional standard.
The truth is, though, that such shows are meant for entertainment – and they better work as entertainment or they won’t get a sufficient audience to survive. So the trick of these shows is to convey the message that they are serious and promoting in-depth discussion of important medical, cultural and social issues.
The latest such professional to carry that off successfully is Dr. Mehmet Cengiz Öz or, as he is more commonly known, “Dr. Oz..” According to Wikipedia, he got his media start as a health expert on Oprah. The Wikipedia entry is a portrait of a bright and accomplished individual, with some interesting contradictions. On the one hand, he’s the director of the Cardiovascular Institute and Complementary Medicine Program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and has received numerous awards for his medical work. On the other hand, as the wikipedia entry states, he was “awarded” the “2011 James Randi Educational Foundation Media Pigasus Award, which the foundation states is for promoting “nonsense”. The foundation complained about Oz’s support of energy medicine, faith healing and psychic mediums, among other controversial practices. Oz is the first person to receive a Pigasus Award two years in a row.“
Having viewed a couple of segments of his syndicated show, my impression is that while I don’t doubt he’s highly professional in the operating room, it’s the showman part of his personality that presides over his show.
All of that is a really long lead-in to the news that Dr. Oz is doing a show on assisted suicide. They will be taping tomorrow (October 198). A number of disability activists will be in a small select audience around a panel of “experts” during the show (this is not the show’s everyday format, but is a customary format for the more controversial segments).
I expect that readers of this blog might wonder how Dr. Oz will do handling this complex topic.
So far, the indications aren’t good that this show will be handled well at all.
NDY was contacted last week by one of the show’s producers. We were asked to participate in the select audience and suggest other disability activists who might want to participate. Their plan, we were told, was to have members of NDY, Final Exit Network, Compassion & Choices, etc. to make up the select audience and to have the panel be composed of Dr. Oz and two others who were not from these pro or con assisted suicide groups..
After several days of making arrangements for people to contact producers, we got the news on Friday last week (October 14) that the panel of experts was set and contrary to previous statements, Barbara Coombs Lee (President of Compassion & Choices) would be on the “expert panel.”
The members of the panel, will, of course, get most of the air time. So who else is on the panel of experts?
- Dr. Keith Ablow – appearing as an expert opposed to assisted suicide, Ablow is another media medical expert, most often seen these days on Fox News. His essay following Kevorkian’s death showed no real knowledge of the nonterminal status of Kevorkian’s “clients” or awareness that Kevorkian had a very broad agenda in terms of who should be eligible for his “assistance.” It’s doubtful that Ablow has any real indepth knowledge of the practices, politics and personalities in the assisted suicide debate.
- Dr. Ira Byock – appearing as an expert opposed to assisted suicide, Dr. Byock is currently Chair, Palliative Medicine, Dartmouth Medical School; Director of Palliative Medicine, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center; and Professor, Dartmouth Medical School, Departments of Anesthesiology and Community and Family Medicine. Dr. Byock has been a consistent and clear voice of opposition to assisted suicide and can speak eloquently as to how quality palliative care and hospice render any “need” for assisted suicide moot. Because he spends his professional life helping real patients and families facing impending death, he’s also not likely to have much familiarity with the intricacies of the practices and rhetoric of the assisted suicide movement in cases where they’ve moved beyond “terminal” as the important criterion for eligibility. (disclosure: I know Ira Byock personally, and I think maybe the most important thing to know about him is what I wrote in a previous post – “everything I know about Ira Byock supports the belief that his entire career has been devoted to better patient care – most of it at people’s bedsides. If I – or someone close to me – was seriously ill, I would love for him to be in charge of the care for me or a loved one.”)
- Montel Williams – appearing as an expert in favor of assisted suicide. While Montel Williams has done great work with programs raising funds for research into treatment and/or a cure for multiple sclerosis (which he himself has) and to link low-income people up with a program that allows them to obtain medications they need but can’t afford, there’s little evidence he brings anything into this discussion except a personal viewpoint and his celebrity status.
So that leaves Barbara Coombs Lee as the only one on the panel with comprehensive knowledge about developments, politics, etc regarding assisted suicide – simply because it’s her job to keep track of those things. It’s also her job to spin the facts (or more than spin) to put the best face possible on both assisted suicide and her organization.
That’s a textbook example of how to build the appearance of balance while stacking the deck.
Not that any of this matters to Dr. Oz or the show itself. You can see for yourself how little effort and thought they’ve given to what they call a “survey” on their site which solicits people’s opinions on the “right to die.” The trouble is, the whole thing was put together in a way that totally conflates refusal of treatment with assisted suicide. We sent in a written request for the survey to be edited to use clear terminology, with a brief explanation, which the producer assured us was forwarded to the person in charge of the online surveys. I suspect that Dr. Oz, if confronted with the sloppiness, would throw some staffperson under the bus. But it’s all under his name and I’m sure he’s made it clear just how much detail they need to bother with – which in this case is not much.
The link to the “survey” is here. Please feel free to fill it out and leave comments. Maybe they’ll even read them.
The final punchline in all of this is that the panel/audience taping is expected to be about 90 minutes long. That means barely half (approx. 44 minutes) of the taping ends up airing. There is no guarantee that anything from any NDYer or disability activist will get aired at all. (I’m guessing they’ll be generous with air time to Ablow and Williams in hopes of a future media quid pro quo.)
If what you’ve read here concerns you in terms of how the (I’m struggling to avoid wizard of oz puns) show will handle this, please feel free to to contact the show via this online form. –Stephen Drake
Thanks for the warning and the guest list, annotated, Stephen.
The main problem with doctors/physicians is the uncritical reception they get when they speak, write, give opinions.
The title of a good book on the politics of illness (my own, based on the experience of people with CFS/ME primarily and the gov’t response), “Osler’s Web”, is a lesson about the English physician, Osler, who listened to patients. That could be a lesson for all physicians, still and one the panels on “assisted suicide” need to learn: listen to disabled people. Our interest is “cleaner” than the so-called “experts”. We are not in it for profit motive.
Yet, we frighten them. We tell the truth. We may not be “pretty”. I think “disabilophobia” fits, like xenophobia, homophobia,
Islamophobia.
Thanks for the education about this show. You’re right that the most consistent bias in the media is not the one that people most allege i.e. idealogical bias. The most consistent and pervasive distortion is the “entertainment” distortion.
While it’s true that there are ways to make educational topics entertaining, it requires much less talent and effort to just be entertaining without the constraints of being accurate and careful. It definitely sounds like this “Dr Oz” show will tend toward the latter formula. We can hope that we’ll be wrong.
Thanks for the heads up. Any idea when the show will air?
About treatment refusal vs. assisted suicide, I’ve been having trouble explaining the difference lately. Can you give some pointers or refer me to an explanation that can be most easily grasped?
I will watch with interest at the Dr. Oz show. From the looks of the people who will be on the panel, it seems fairly balanced. The one thing I questioned about the article is the statement, “Dr. Byock has been a consistent and clear voice of opposition to assisted suicide and can speak eloquently as to how quality palliative care and hospice render any ‘need’ for assisted suicide moot.” I’ve seen plenty of people in Hospice who were dying from terrible diseases who couldn’t be helped by palliative care because of the nature of their disease. So it will be interesting to hear Dr. Byock’s perspective on that.
Stephen,
I agree with what you said, in regards to the Dr. Oz show. I was contacted by a few of their show producers last week on Wednesday, regarding their interest in having me there to participate in the “Assisted Suicide” episode. During the initial conversation, they asked me very personal questions about my health and my viewpoints regarding the right-to-die. The conversation made me feel like I was being investigated by them. They wanted to know very specific details about me, including when I plan to “exit”, my method for “exiting”, and my involvement in FEN. They also wanted to send a video camera to my home, asking me to film an elaborate video for their show, detailing my health condition by showing how it has physically affected me, etc. Initially, they made the episode seem like it was going to be a personal “intervention” episode, which I conveyed to them I wasn’t interested in participating in that kind of episode, that my focus in the media, is to discuss about right-to-die issues. They responded, explaining that the episode would involve discussion by a few “experts”, alongside me, my being an integral part of the episode. They continued to mention how “important” the video they wanted me to make of myself, was to the show, and repeatedly trying to get me to assure them that I’d be available for their field producer to guide me through making this video for them.
They also had their “travel team”, contact me that day, to set up travel arrangements, which they made it seem that the “travel team”, was in-house, rather than as a third-party company they outsource potential guests’ travel arrangements to. While the “travel team” did in fact contact me on Wednesday evening, to set up the travel arrangements, they never contacted me back with any sort of followup information, let alone finalized details of the travel plans. After not hearing from anyone connected with the show at all on Thursday, other than the field producer, I began to have concerns about this, as being a person who suffers from disability, I need to have travel arrangements made as soon as possible, in order to physically prepare to travel, and to have assurance prior to that, in that my travel needs are being met. On Friday, I still hadn’t heard back from the “travel team”, but I was told by the show producers I spoke with on Friday, that the “travel team” was indeed a third party company, and how it was impossible for them to accommodate my needs of knowing the travel arrangements right away, which after a long debate regarding other issues, the show producers acknowledged that they indeed could find out the travel arrangements right away. The long debate mostly pertained to how I’d be accommodated at the show, which led into a debate regarding the show itself.
From where I left off in my previous comment :
By Friday, the show producers had strayed away from their previous insistence of me making the video, as I still was concerned that it could be used as a way of developing a personal story about me. The show producers were now telling me that the episode was going to center around Compassion & Choices, along with a panel of their experts, but not involve me for more than two or three minutes, and that quite possibly, the segment featuring the portion of it that I’d be in, could very well be edited out. Despite my being hurt and offended at the way the show producers had been misleading me, I still was interested in attending the show, in wanting to at least be able to speak with people backstage. However, the show producers suddenly decided to inform me, that I’d be required to give them permission to access my entire medical history through all of my medical records, etc. They claimed it was for legal reasons to prove that I indeed have neuropathy. I suggested to them, since I barely was going to get a chance to speak at all on the show, that I not even be mentioned as having a neuropathy, but simply that I’m “disabled” and that I’m a member of Final Exit Network, along with any allotted time I’d have in speaking. They denied my suggestion, hence, I didn’t end up going on the show.