Don’t believe everything you read in the media…erm, like stuff on the internet
I had a patient in recently to have their eyes examined, who is a university lecturer in a healthcare subject. She was clutching a cutting from a popular national newspaper, which was waxing lyrical about the benefits of a new surgical treatment which espouses to remove the need for reading glasses.
Straight away, I asked her which clinic the article was written by and she looked blankly at me. I showed her the bottom of the article, where there is always a ‘for more information’ web/e-mail address. Thinking about it, not only are all of these articles written by people flogging stuff, I can’t remember the last time I saw an article which was written by a journalist let alone a science or health correspondent. These articles that are quite clearly a press release submitted by a private company and are nothing better than an advert, but are extremely cleverly veiled as quality journalism.
We tend to subconsciously form the opinion that the particular newspaper or form of media we have chosen as being a suitable lens through which we view our world, is on our side. We have usually chosen it because its editorial policies stroke our own personal prejudices and consequently we buy into it a bit (myself included). We end up thinking that it is working hard to uncover conspiracies and cut through spin – maybe this is indeed the case when there’s no money in it. Unfortunately, the funding model is such that they exist through advertising revenues and therefore to some degree or another, are bound to provide the best value for money. When dealing with magazines previously, I have been told that an article written by me will not get the publication unless I also buy advertising. Or to turn that around, if I buy the advertising I will get the column inches.
The problem is simply that private medicine is a bit different. Healthcare has big stakes, big money, big words and small print. Equally, people who have a health problem and or even a sight-threating one, in my opinion are some of the most vulnerable consumers around. They will do anything to fix their problem and that stops them approaching these products and services with their usual level of caution.
When we were growing up around the dinner table, often discussing some current news item as a family, my late mother would have simply not accepted a statistic quoted by someone without a reference. If the reference supplied was deemed to be insufficient, a reply would be issued that ‘paper doesn’t refuse ink.’ It is entirely possible to write a piece including absolutely nothing but the truth yet, purely by omission, let the reader carry themselves down a path which is most advantageous to the writers cause.