ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, June 24, 1996 TAG: 9606240018
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BEN BEAGLE
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
You have to agree with those doctors who concluded recently that television is saving too many lives with CPR.
You know.
Somebody comes to the emergency room with no heartbeat - for any number of usually violent reasons - and they get out the paddles and start pounding on the poor victim's, er, um, patient's chest.
The monitor is flat, but all of sudden it starts spiking and making comforting beep-beep sounds - television medicine has saved someone else.
Recently, a group of real doctors said that far fewer people survive CPR in real life than on TV. They had surveyed the tube and apparently watched 60 instances of CPR on 97 programs.
(No. I don't know who took care of these doctors' patients while they watched TV. In the old days of television medicine, Dr. Marcus Welby would never have neglected his patients that way.)
The doctors, reporting in the New England Journal of Medicine, said the success with CPR on television leaves the public with a false impression about its effectiveness.
They said this is especially true for those of us now close to gathering at the river, who get the wrong idea and expect to be revived by some last-minute heroics. Fat chance, they said.
We used to see much the same thing in the movies. Freddie Bartholemew would be sick as a horse, and the doctor would say the "crisis" had come.
The "crisis" would pass, and Freddie would wake up and say, "Where have I been, Aunt Tibbety?'' Incidentally, Aunt Tibbety was usually played by Beulah Bondi, who knew her way around a sickroom.
All the young terrorists on my street wanted a "crisis" just to show they could get through one as easily as that sissy Freddie Bartholemew.
These doctors are to be commended, and their research should be extended to other areas of television and movie medicine.
There's heart surgery. The monitors are going blinkety-blink and the nurse is swabbing the surgeon's forehead and the operating room clock speeds up to show the surgery took eight hours.
The next scene shows a happy family gathered around a broadly grinning patient - the staples and the incision not showing.
I don't want to keep these doctors away from their practices any longer, but I think we need a survey of how television handles other medical matters.
For instance, is the patient ever shown after he gets the bill, and, if so, is he still grinning?
LENGTH: Medium: 52 linesby CNB