Innovative class explores media impact on medical experiences

When medicine met media
Innovative class explores media impact on medical experiences

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

“Grey’s Anatomy.” “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” “ER.” “House, M.D.” Though the list might look more like a television guide than a class syllabus, it is actually part of the Medicine and Media class created and taught by Kirsten Ostherr, associate professor of English. She uses the current shows — as well as some familiar favorites like “M.A.S.H.” and “St. Elsewhere” — and research texts to explore medical imaging technologies and the role of mass media in shaping understanding of the body, health and disease. 

	JEFF FITLOW
	Students in Ostherr’s class explore one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging, a functional MRI (fMRI) machine in Eagleman’s lab.

Funded by a Faculty Initiative Fund award, Ostherr set out to create a course that provided a framework for premedical students to better understand the positive and negative impact of imaging technologies and their use in mass media. Health care is increasingly promoted and delivered through imaging technologies, and researchers have identified media literacy as a critical component of both medical training and public-health intervention.

“Television and film have a powerful influence in shaping patient expectations of what is possible,” Ostherr said. “The shows present the idea that medical imaging makes a diagnosis possible and therefore treatable. That influences real-life patients to think an MRI or CAT scan will solve their problems.”

To show her students what actually is possible with some current medical devices, Ostherr teamed up with David Eagleman ’93, director of neuroscience and psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine. The visit came about as a result of Eagleman’s recent “The Brain and the Law” lecture for Scientia, an institute at Rice for the history of science and culture, of which Ostherr is a fellow. Wiess College senior Tommy Sprague, an undergraduate Scientia fellow, works in Eagleman’s lab and helped coordinate the visit. 

Eagleman’s lab has one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging, a functional MRI (fMRI). It measures the regulation of blood flow in the brain related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord.

“The trip to see the fMRI machine was outstanding,” said Jon Endean, Wiess College sophomore. “Not only did it enable me to see a little bit of what is currently going on behind the massive facade of skyscrapers across the street, but it also showed me what sort of opportunities are available in the field of medicine.”

Fiction fuels funds

Though science is in the early stages of understanding fMRIs, fictional medical shows lead viewers to believe those advances are much further along. While it can hinder patients’ understanding of their diagnosis and treatment, it can also prompt more funding for research into these technologies.

“Desire for research is fueled in part by what’s fictional,” Ostherr said. “Popular media affects public opinion, and that influences what gets funded.”

Physicians are not exempt from media’s power. Ostherr said that studies have shown that physicians’ prescribing practices are influenced significantly by advertising. Because of that, she has her class spend a lot of time on advertising.

“I want them to learn to think critically about advertising,” Ostherr said. “When they become physicians, they will become the target of these ads, so it is important that they are able to identify the ploys and don’t accept the ads at face value.”

A humanities perspective

Ostherr’s research interests stem from her work in the fields of historical public health films, medicine and media, and image ethics. Her current book project, “Medical Visions: Producing the Patient Through Film, Television and Imaging Technologies,” proposes that the historical legacy of mid-20th-century medical motion pictures, television programs and imaging technologies forms the unacknowledged subtext of current models of visual pedagogy. She asserts that to use visual media as effective educational tools, physicians and other health experts must learn to recognize the underlying interpretive paradigms that structure their “ways of seeing.”

KIRSTEN OSTHERR

Her study is based on archival research on health film and television production, as well as the promotional materials that are associated with imaging technologies and disseminated by their manufacturers and the hospitals that use them. By considering health imaging in the context of educational and entertainment film and television genres, Ostherr draws on a rich body of scholarship addressing the ethics of persuasive messages while emphasizing the role of historical knowledge in preventing the unintentional reproduction of harmful forms of representation.

“In my research I have seen how mass media and advertising are shaping patient-physician relationships,” Ostherr said. “Learning about this material now will make students much better doctors. Before they ever go to medical school, they are getting an opportunity to explore and absorb these topics more deeply.”

Ostherr’s students didn’t have to wait until they entered medical school or became doctors to begin reaping the benefits of her class.

“The class has allowed me to expand my interests into academic areas that before the semester did not personally seem possible,” said Spencer Reynolds, Lovett College sophomore. “The merging of the rigidity of science with the fluidity of a discussion-based humanities class allowed me not only to become more open-minded about the humanities department, but to look at my science classes from a new direction.”

Reynolds said that until Ostherr’s class, the majority of his knowledge of medicine has been scientifically based. He said that now, having learned about cultural aspects of medicine, he feels more balanced and prepared to go to medical school.

A math and chemistry major, Endean too found the humanities perspective valuable to his current academic and future career pursuits.

“I have appreciated Dr. Ostherr’s opinions and advice regarding medicine seeing as she comes from a totally different — yet valuable — perspective than what I’m used to,” Endean said. “This class shows that Rice is interested in not only feeding the premeds here information but ensuring that they have a well-rounded perspective on the field of medicine.”