"Grey's Anatomy" was my guilty pleasure. Yesterday, I stopped feeling guilty. Turns out that the show's writers worked with the Kaiser Foundation in order to embed an important public health message in one episode. Viewers were then polled to find out if they absorbed the information. The experiment worked. After watching a show in which an HIV-positive woman learns she has a 98 percent chance of giving birth to a HIV-negative baby if she follows proper precautions, the audience's awareness of the facts on HIV-transmission between mothers and infants increased by 46 percent, from 15 to 61 percent of viewers understanding the issue.
Of course, a typical episode of "Grey's," while often fairly medically accurate, features a plot built around some incredibly rare and gruesome condition, such as a 40 pound neglected tumor, or fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, an extremely rare genetic disease in which soft tissue progressively turns into bone, ossifying the entire body over time. The Kaiser study shows that there'd be a real public benefit to medical shows focusing more frequently on common public health issues, and especially on prevention.
--Dana Goldstein
