The New Yorker; Don't Believe All You Read

Columnist Jerome Groopman is an MD who writes about health issues for the New Yorker. He is a good writer and comes across as a caring physician - and if you value your mental health you will not read him.

Each time he appears he writes in the persona of the concerned practitioner. Yet the arc of his narrative is always the same. Open - to dramatic scene of suffering (tug at heart strings); Cut to concerned doctor, and how he got started; Intercut episodes of concerned doctor, patient, patient's nearest and dearest, other doctors. The narrative comes to a close as puzzled, but good-guy doctor makes progress, but does not achieve total cure.

The message in every case is circumscribed by this narrative arc, which is eerily similar to a bad Hollywood movie's structure. It says, in effect: we super-hero doctors are trying hard, and we made real progress this time, but watch out! Those nasty germs will be back, and we'll have to fight them! So, stand back and let us do our heroic work!

This 'Doctor-as-Batman' ideal, where the MD serves a startled but grateful populace, is a dangerous myth. It is also self-serving for MD Groopman. It is indeed his 'style' of writing - or what I'd call his formula.

If you've ever had a dangerous disease (as I have), one that has stumped the specialists, what you'll usually find is not a doctor who will take infinite pains to cure you. You are much more likely to find doctors who hand you on to the next 'specialist' before they disappear from sight and responsibility. In the meantime, you will grow weaker, and perhaps come near to death. Perhaps you will die. I nearly did. The doctor wouldn't know if you did, because by now you've been referred to so many other practitioners that she or he's long forgotten about you. unless you are very wealthy this is what you can expect.

Groopman shows his posturing most clearly in two places. The first is he never, ever, refers to alternative medicine or complementary treatments. The patient is always an object to be treated to yet more 'tests'. The second aspect emerges from this. He almost never mentions the mental distress of his patients. In the most recent article (Feb 7th, 2011), a very young girl with food allergies is treated with repeated 'tests'; if they go well she can stomach the food. If not she has a violent allergic reaction, vomits, and shows signs of distress. In one case she is, as a precaution, hooked up to an IV with the correct cocktail of antidotes, before she bites the specially baked muffin that is the 'test' food. Ask yourself what sort of effect this will have on a young child, psychologically, when repeated over a course of years. think about eating disorders and young women, for instance.

Groopman doesn't bother to ask such questions.

Neither does he ask about other causes of allergies (environmental, etc. etc) which he merely mentions in passing. He doesn't ever approach such ideas as acupuncture, massage, or even yoga, which have saved many 'incurable' cases.

If the medium has some impact on the message (as we are all so fond of recalling) then Groopman's article begs important questions about the truths we are expected to follow, or perhaps swallow. And I gag on his.

The New Yorker is not doing a public service by printing Groopman's words, which have the effect or making the reader feel passive, helpless, and even frightened. At the same time he creates the aura of the bold and fearless genius who is 'the doctor', in contradiction to everything we actually know to be the case.

Dramatic stories that mislead us are, in fact, closer to propaganda than to journalism.