In a Time of Pandemic, TV Doctors Wield Growing Influence. Is That A Good Thing?

When the history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, people will remember the rubbish as much as the real. We’ll remember President Trump musing aloud about injecting Americans with disinfectant; psychologist Phil McGraw—TV’s Dr. Phil—arguing against the nationwide lockdown on the grounds that people die from cigarettes, automobile accidents and drownings and yet we don’t shut the country down for those; and Dr. Mehmet Oz seeming to advocate that a two or three percentage point increase in mortality rates (which would be the equivalent of some 8-9 million Americans lives lost) wouldn’t be such a bad trade off for reopening schools. But we will remember too the people who have gotten it mostly right: the doctor-journalists who usually play a supporting role in network and cable newscasts and have now become the leading performers. For the better part of two months, both the evening news programs and round-the-clock cable fare have become all coronavirus all the time, and reporters with M.D.s have effectively become bedside physicians to a nation, ministering to 328 million Americans. The phenomenon has been its own strange form of telemedicine—not the one-on-one Zoom sessions that homebound Americans are having with their GPs and specialists and psychologists, but national group therapy, live-streamed daily, from TV studios, from the field, from the rostrum of the White House press room. The doctors, like it or not, now have a wai...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news