Maybe television doctors shouldn’t discuss nuanced issues of life or death on the air.
At some point, we need to deal with the fact that the honorific “Dr.” is so vague. A guy with a PhD — no small achievement, generally — is a “Dr.” as surely as is a practicing neurosurgeon at the Cleveland Clinic. An epidemiologist who leads a national effort to fight a viral pandemic is a “Dr.”; so is a guy who has a doctorate in psychology. Doctors all around — but with widely varying expertise.
Sometimes the fungibility of the term can make lines of expertise blurry, particularly during cable news appearances.
On Thursday night, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham had two “Drs.” on her program: that national epidemiologist and the one with a psychology degree. The former was Anthony S. Fauci, leading member of the White House coronavirus task force. The latter was Phil McGraw, who is not a practicing psychologist, much less a physician or an infectious disease expert. One of her guests offered Ingraham a nuanced assessment of why the coronavirus that’s spread across the United States demands a unique response and isn’t readily comparable with past outbreaks of other viruses. The other, again, was McGraw.
He started out in reasonable territory.
“Two hundred and fifty people a year die from poverty, and the poverty line is getting such that more and more people are going to fall below that because the economy is crashing around us,” McGraw said. “And they’re doing that because people are dying from the coronavirus. I get that.”
Then came the “but.”
“But, look, the fact of the matter is we have people dying — 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents,” McGraw said. “480,000 from cigarettes. 360,000 a year from swimming pools, but we don’t shut the country down for that. But yet we’re doing it for this? And the fallout is going to last for years because people’s lives are being destroyed…”
To read the entire article from The Washington Post, click https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/17/lets-explore-exactly-why-dr-phils-coronavirus-arguments-are-so-obtuse/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most
