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| Bill Weir of ABC-News |
Let's get
this straight: I like Bill Weir. He co-anchors NIGHTLINE and his
tongue-in-cheek features often leave me laughing.
But Tuesday night Bill Weir inadvertently went from
writing about to becoming the subject of the latest,
hot-off-the-press celebrity doctor book to hit The New York Times bestseller list
in 7:06 minutes, the length of the story.
For the entire week in fact, ABC-News has provided David
Agus, MD, a media platform unrivaled by the introduction of any other medical
book that I can remember. Is it ratings week? Publicists must be soaking in
champagne. While Weir called the Agus book “the most anticipated medical book
of the year,” what I heard was a well-respected physician telling an old story
in a new way that is a lot more expensive.
Ask any doctor or advocate: making prevention sexy
is the hardest job in town.
In Weir's case, the calamity prevented was a
potentially fatal heart attack. The diagnostic testing he underwent as part of his
assignment (at the request of Dr. Agus) revealed a "calcification in the
largest artery leading to the heart." That’s a walking time bomb. I'm
not knocking the prevention message. Neither are the hundreds and thousands of
other internists, family practitioners, and other professionals who find
themselves saying the same thing, in different ways, day in and day out. For
years. Maybe the ABC story will reach the ears of other 40-year old men who,
like Weir, considered yearly check-ups a great idea for anyone but them.
But I'm not convinced. His story, compelling from an
emotional standpoint but low on fact, had an amazing infomercial quality. The
prevention aspect really wasn't about prevention at all. It was about the early
detection of disease using "cutting-edge" (read expensive)
technology. This is not the kind of health reporting we need. Here's why:
The
Celebrity Factor - the "rock star of science" physician.
Both
Diane Sawyer and Bill Weir both were quick to point out that Dr. Agus had
consulted with Lance Armstrong and Ted Kennedy and as Weir stated, “… kept
Steve Jobs alive years beyond what anyone thought was possible."
Stop right there. Lance, Ted and Steve. Not
your everyday individuals. Not your everyday, readily preventable cancers,
either. As far as I know there is NO prevention, not to mention early
detection, for glioblastoma, the lethal form of brain cancer that claimed
Senator Kennedy's life. Perhaps there’s
some combination of blood markers that’s detailed in the book but this small
and obviously intentional mention of the three famous patients propagates
existing disparities in our medical system.
One of the secret fears of any person with a
life-threatening illness is that somehow, somewhere, there's some treatment
that's better than what they can access or afford. To this end too many troll
the internet, buying vitamins, supplements, treatments and other 'cures' from
quack doctors and companies. Thousands of people who are perfectly healthy do
the same thing in the hope of slowing aging or enhancing athletic performance. There
are too many people who think that anyone who puts up a professional-looking web
page with the MD tagging along after their name is a "rock star doctor."
Do you think I’m exaggerating? Hang
around Twitter for a day and watch what people are buying, thinking and doing
as part of a ‘healthy’ lifestyle.
The best doctors are those who
partner with you. That’s the new health equation. The NIGHTLINE
piece mistakenly leaves the impression that big doctor, big technology leads to
big health when in fact, the opposite is just as true. The accretion of
everyday choices, how much we move, what we eat, what we do and do not do, even
how we think combined yes, with good technology and medical guidance can lead
to good health for many.
Ultimately, the real ‘rock star
doctors’ don't have time for television interviews. That doesn't make them any
less than those on the best seller lists. They are the ones, who, often late at
night, answer emails from patients who aren't even theirs just to set someone
straight.
What
Didn't Meet the Eye
Anytime
you hear the phrase "cutting edge technology" in health care stories take
a deep breath. Cutting edge usually means procedures your insurance carrier is
bound to deny -- unless Medicare decides to cover it first. Then your carrier
will eventually follow suit.
"The unfortunate truth is that you do
have some heart disease now," Dr. Agus tells Bill Weir early on in the
piece. That's the pivotal moment. The reporter’s face freezes. All of us with
cancer have had the same deer-in-the-headlights moment. It's awful. Your
stomach curls. That's also the moment when the reporter’s fact-finding
questions vaporize. Once the reporter is the story perspective
is gone. Now we’re sharing Bill
Weir’s encounter with mortality. We feel badly for him. We feel badly that his
father died and truly, we DON'T want his daughter to become an orphan. In a rapid flash we’ve seen photos of all of
them.
That's television. You become so involved in story
that logical questions fade. Just a few of those questions are:
- would a large calcification in a
major artery been detected in a routine annual exam?
- Was/is there a history of heart
disease in Bill Weir’s family? Doesn't ABC-News require - or encourage -
its employees and key players to undergo wellness tests? Better yet, does yours? Or do you have
your own wellness plan in place?
- And finally, what can you do when
people feel they are invincible? Very few are reporters who
were asked (and allowed) by their network to undergo tests totaling
thousands of dollars as part of a week-long feature called, The End
of Illness. Amazingly, this also happens to be the title of
David Agus’s book.
The
Elephant in the Room
The elephant, which I should have seen coming before
she walked right over me, was the DNA testing company founded by Dr. Agus in
2006 that provided some of Weir’s testing. Whether or not the DNA analysis led
to the CT scan or not wasn’t clear. Whether the DNA analysis indicated anything
else to prevent other than the big blob in Bill’s artery wasn’t clear. The
price of the combined tests, not to mention the entire topic of DNA analysis,
certainly wasn’t clear. It was ‘good television’ but certainly not good
reporting.
People deserve better. They deserve
reporters and producers who read between the lines. I can point out hundreds of
cancer survivors who did everything right and were diagnosed with cancer
anyway. Their perspectives on “the new this” or “the new that” is occasionally
and understandably jaded. What needs to
be evaluated is of what use this information be to them now. We need to focus
on preventing the next cancer, which may or may not be something subject
to our control. And there’s the ultimate
illusion: that technology can help us control everything.
Maybe.
Maybe not. Can NAVIGENICS’s cutting edge DNA analysis tell me, or anyone
else, if there’s an errant genetic blip just waiting kick off cancer again?
Would the good measures I already have in place change a genetic reality one
iota?
Stay
tuned. I downloaded The End to Illness faster than you
can say jack rabbit. I’m about to go see
for myself.
In
the meantime, I’ll repeat what Dr. Agus told Bill Weir, “Real food, regular
schedule, live healthy.”
And Happy New Year.
###
To help us separate the fact from fiction, boldface from embellished, I'm thrilled to welcome health care journalist and critic Gary Schwitzer to #BCSM tomorrow night. The publisher of the well-respected Health News Review will walk us through the review criteria for analyzing studies, the ABC's of health care reporting (accuracy, balance, completeness) and suggestions on making the most of reported information.
