Journalists' pursuit of human interest stories can wreck doctors' lives and threaten patient care, according to Raymond Tallis, professor of geriatric medicine at Manchester University. Speaking in London last week at a debate on standards of medical journalism, Professor Tallis said, “One of the most striking trends in recent years has been the increasing ease with which journalists smash the lives of doctors and ruin the reputation of hospitals.” He criticised journalists' coverage of the organ retention issue at Alder Hey Children's Hospital, Liverpool (BMJ 2001;322: 371 [Google Scholar]), saying that journalists had joined hands with lawyers, “opportunist politicians, and grieving parents, to transform what had hitherto been routine practice—organ retention—into a macabre ritual.” Professor Tallis said, “The scale of what Dick van Velzen, the pathologist at the heart of the scandal, did was unacceptable but retention of organs was within the law” and within the ethical guidelines. He added, “This did not prevent endless hysterical, persecutory coverage with tabloids hounding doctors and managers.” Professor Tallis, author of Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and its Discontents, an analysis of modern medicine published last year (BMJ 2004;329: 982 [Google Scholar]), said that the effects of this “hysteria” were still being played out. “Over a dozen consultants, including some of the finest paediatricians in the country, had their lives wrecked and some have not worked since, though none, bar van Velzen, was found guilty of any misdemeanour by the GMC [General Medical Council].” Life for staff in the hospital became unbearable, plans for improving services were put on hold, and organ donation fell, “as a result of which quite a few children died unnecessarily,” he told the debate, organised by the Guild of Health Writers. Professor Tallis said there had been many other instances of “disgraceful” treatment in the press, with the “unhuman pursuit of the human story.” He said, “Numerous doctors have been hounded and when they have been exonerated of crimes, no apology has been issued. One gets the impression that to some journalists `soul murder' is a small price to pay for a good story.” He also criticised what he considered journalists' failure to put things that go wrong in perspective, citing two incidents at Treliske Hospital in Cornwall in the mid-1990s. “In one a nurse was assisting at an appendix operation when, apparently, she shouldn't have been doing so. The patient was fine and the nurse and the surgeon got a bollocking. In the other the parents of a baby found that a needle had been left in its back two weeks after it had been discharged from hospital. The baby was fine but this caused a huge furore. And several papers started asking, `What is happening to health care in Cornwall?' Nothing was happening—two unfortunate events out of tens of millions of transactions do not amount to a trend.” Professor Tallis criticised the reporting of the case of a surgeon in Wales who removed the wrong kidney from a patient at Prince Philip Hospital, Llanelli, in January 2000. The patient later died. Reports failed to put the incident into context of the surgeon's own record, and that of kidney operations nationally, said Professor Tallis. Instead, he said, the surgeon “was precipitated into national notoriety and his life was made hell. And then questions were asked about our `scandal-hit' NHS. One newspaper discovered that over the previous 10 years three wrong kidneys had been taken out in NHS hospitals. What the journalists omitted to mention was the number of kidneys correctly removed during the 10 year period—approximately 75 000.” He also criticised what he saw as the media's practice of giving equal weight to individuals involved in controversy and people in a position to give authoritative comment. A world expert on vaccination reporting a carefully controlled study of 1.5 million children who had received a vaccine would be given the same airtime as a mother convinced that her child had been harmed by the vaccine, he said. “Too often health reporting gives equal coverage to the views of those who could put the facts in perspective and give them the correct interpretation and those who do not wish to do so or are unable to do so. In the case of MMR only sheer luck has so far prevented medical journalism from producing a public health catastrophe,” he said. An “infantile preference for conspiracy theories over data” had worldwide consequences, he said. The credence given to the theories of US virologist Peter Duesberg—that HIV does not cause AIDS—by the Sunday Times and others in the 1990s, was still having an effect. “The after-echo is Thabo Mbeki's hostility to antivirals in South Africa, costing perhaps 100 000 unnecessary deaths a year, 35 000 of them children.” Vivienne Parry, science editor of Good Housekeeping magazine and a former presenter of BBC's Tomorrow's World, replying to Professor Tallis' criticisms, said that journalists should not ignore new results simply because they challenged current scientific thinking. Hilly Janes, editor of the Times's Body & Soul supplement, said that medical journalism often served patients' best interests as in the case of the compensation of thalidomide damaged children, following a campaign by the Sunday Times. It was an investigation by Brian Deer for the Sunday Times, in February 2004, that had revealed that Dr Andrew Wakefield, the main proponent of claims that MMR causes autism, was being paid by the Legal Aid Board to investigate children who were allegedly vaccine damaged for a possible legal action, she pointed out. Niall Dickson, chief executive of the King's Fund since 2004 and former social affairs editor at the BBC, identified a “cartoonisation of complex science” and “a world of victims and villains.” At its worst the media overstates and oversimplifies, he said. Source
