When the media totally gets it wrong

When the media starts talking about a topic you are acutely aware of or one that's personal to you, you are more aware of when they get it wrong. In my case, birth advocacy and thyroid disease awareness are two subjects that are close to my heart and something I know a lot about.

So it's utterly depressing and maddening when you come across an article that is just so bad and misleading that you want to scream at the top of your lungs.

When the news does a terrible job covering a topic you're
intimately familiar with, it makes you wonder how
they handle all the other stuff.
Photo credit: jayofboy/freeimages

This one - The Daily Mail's "Australian woman gives herself a Cesarean section" - is pretty horrendous. You immediately conjure up images of serious peril; something has gone horribly wrong and she's in dire straits with no sign of help anywhere, right? Wrong!

Apparently, this is an article about a maternal-assisted cesarean (definitely not the same as performing the surgery on yourself, as the Mail implies), something that is verrrrrry slowwwwwwly catching on in the birth community. By slowly I mean probably at a snail's pace, because we still don't hear very much about it. The woman, disappointed over the fact that she could not have a VBAC with the twins she was carrying, decided that she wanted more of an active role in the birth and presented her case to her OB, who - not surprisingly - flatly refused. Apparently after he did more research, (gasp!) he changed his mind. (double gasp!)

"'(The doctor) was quite willing once he realized the risk of infection wasn't as high as he perhaps first thought,' Mrs. Wolffe said.'"

Amazing. An OB that listened the patient, while still yielding to necessary medical intervention, and they both had a positive outcome. I am speechless.

However, that's not the problem. Further down in the article, a video accompanies it captioned 'Live Cesarean: graphic 2013 video of birth broadcast on Twitter." Okay… except that's not the Australian woman's birth they're showing. In fact, it's from a hospital in Texas, something the Mail doesn't exactly explain beforehand and most people from their UK readership didn't pick up on (including, apparently, all the American accents in the room).

How this had anything to do with this woman's birth is beyond me, but it sure makes for great fodder for readers to totally attack her - everything from her looks, to her birthing practices, to a "DIY birth" (which it obviously was not). Some even criticized the weight of the babies, for whatever reason. At any rate, it did nothing to advocate for alternative choices in birth and only made the mother look like a total freak (if you trust the people commenting).

Thanks for totally misleading your readership, Daily Mail. Not that that's anything new, apparently…

Dr. Samadi's commentary on Fox left a lot to be desired,
namely the idea that there is more than one way of
treating thyroid disease - not to mention that many
doctors are neither well-versed in or willing to treat more
complicated cases.

January is Thyroid (Un)Awareness Month
Like bajillions of other Americans, I have thyroid disease, and it's a topic I've written about a lot. I've also basically forced myself to get educated on it in order to understand what was happening to my body, because I found that my doctors were not always that knowledgable. Apparently these guys are no exception.

Dr. David Samadi is apparently one of Fox News' resident doctor experts, which in and of itself isn't bad - except he's a urologist commenting on thyroid disease. Since the two aren't obviously related, I was puzzled why he was weighing in on the subject. While I realize they have time constraints on the broadcast, they really do reflect a serious problem with misinformation and an overall lack of education on the subject, which can often leave patients untreated or improperly medicated.

While I do give him points for mentioning more than just the TSH, it's important to know what to do with the results. Just this week I heard a patient say how enthusiastic their doctor was about ordering tests, even though she'd admitted there were some she had never heard of, but then also admitted she had no idea what to do with the results of the bloodwork. That doesn't help you very much as a patient, but at least she was being honest.

Another expert, NYU Medical School internist Dr. Mark Siegel, gives a very watered-down, extremely over-simplified and perhaps even dismissive explanation. His commentary also left a lot to be desired, and outraged a number of people in the comments who have firsthand experience with the disease.

"Here's the good news…[this] is so treatable… if you have low thyroid, I can give you something called levothyroxine. [It] just replaces the thyroid and you're back to normal. It's a great, great medication." 

Yes. Well. If you do well on levo, that's your business. Not everyone does, and while some prefer the name brand equivalent, Synthroid, some would rather choose neither and use Armour Thyroid instead - but you usually won't catch a single mainstream physician mentioning that in an article about hypothyroidism. Whether it's intentional or not, Synthroid is usually the only drug mentioned, which misleads patients into thinking Armour has been pulled from the market or simply doesn't exist anymore.

And wouldn't it be great if it were "just" that easy! Just pop a pill and you'll feel like a million bucks in no time. For some, it works great and they're on their way, but for others, it's a constant battle to get a physician to treat them adequately and even take them seriously.

When you catch them screwing up on a topic you're familiar with, it almost makes you wonder what they're telling you about all the other stuff.