June 12, 2002

WHY NETWORK TV AND PBS SKEWER ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE

By Nicholas Regush

Let me set it out clearly from the very beginning, just so there won’t be any misunderstandings: There are frauds, hucksters, rip-off artists, BS-ers, money grubbers, and stupid, ignorant, know-nothings, and fools in both conventional and alternative medicine. That’s been my experience over the many years that I’ve worked as a journalist.

But one thing I have also learned is that mass media typically go for the throats of the alternative practitioners far more often because many medical reporters and their supervisors in print and TV news are gutless jerks. (Have I forgotten some attributes?)

If the TV news networks and PBS decided to take the time and not worry so much about their corporate links, it might be even conceivable to turn some of that ignorance around and rip much more into the extraordinary daily fraud committed by conventional medicine - the vast over prescription of drugs and the manipulation of doctors by the drug industry, the fraudulent use of medical devices by doctors who receive benefits in return from the manufacturers, and the deplorable state of peer-review in the medical journals, which have become the playpens for incestuous relationships that promote the status quo and shut out innovative ideas.

It is far easier for the networks and PBS to target "controversial" groups. For one thing, they often do not have the economic clout to take revenge, such as pulling ads. And they lack the troops of lawyers that the conventional medical institutions and drug companies have.

The latest debacle, a segment on PBS channels, beginning on June 4, dealing with chiropractic, is pretty much what happens when ill-prepared researchers and mindless producers are turned loose to give a celebrity such as Alan Alda a forum for dumping all over this alternative form of medicine. The formula is simple. You begin with a case or two and get comments from them about how much they’ve gained from the treatment and then you reveal how gullible these people are. (Keep this in mind the next time you see cancer patients getting trotted out after an early clinical trial to say how much they’ve benefited. Is there follow-up to show that the drug didn’t do so well with a little more time? Not a chance. The piece would never get on the air.)

Then you get a couple of venal critics who attack alternative medicine, in this case, chiropractic. (Keep in mind the next time you see a piece showing how new arthritis drugs are doing well for people and ask where the venal critics are who will reveal the sloppy science and the hyped, misleading statistics that got the piece on air in the first place. Well, you won’t get them, because venal critics are reserved for the attacks on alternative medicine.)

Then, of course, you find some knucklehead host like Alan Alda, who everyone still remembers as a doctor on MASH, and you let him read a simplistic script as he did on chiropractic, a script lacking even the most basic forms of balance. (Keep in mind that a program about so-called important conventional medical advances would be hosted most likely by someone with some heft, rather than a comedian.) Even at the evening news level, when the pieces are quickies, heft becomes very important in delivering new conventional information. Kookier stuff (alternative medicine) can be reported by practically anyone - because it doesn’t really matter.

Recently, ABC’s Peter Jennings hosted a one-hour special on the drug industry. I was often asked what I thought about it. Well, not much. It was derivative reporting for the most part and I thought the piece overall was about five years behind the times. Not good for a major news network with hefty Jennings leading the charge.

Some people told me that I was being too tough on the piece, that many people would still learn something from it. While I have no doubt that the Jennings special was instructive to people who do not follow medical news very much, it disturbed me that ABC was using Jennings to front a piece that was nowhere near scratch. It was extremely lame, and I’ll bet that the drug companies singled out were not terribly upset about what they saw because they had seen it all before.

My guess is that some people thought the Jennings hour was great because there is so little on TV news these days that takes even a soft poke at the drug industry and conventional medicine. The fact is that taking on the bigwigs of the conventional system takes a lot of nerve and commitment. Taking on the much more vulnerable factions of alternative medicine is a lark.