CENTRAL  SOUTH  DAKOTA  MEDICAL NEWS
The Clinical View
by Dr. Phillip Hoffsten, M.D.
3/22/2001

“OUR NEWS MEDIA MAKES US CRAZY”

             Periodically I am struck by things that just appear to be crazy.  To digress for just a moment, crazy can be divided into two broad categories, one called neurosis and one called psychosis.  People that are psychotic believe things that are factually just not true.  They believe things like they are Napoleon, or that they can fly, or that their arm has turned into rotten wood.  If these things that they really believe are true, the rest of us are way off base.  As opposed to psychosis, the person who is neurotic understands and believes the truth but they are very displeased by it.  They just don’t like things the way they are.  This leads to people being anxious or depressed and perhaps for very good reason but none the less, the depression or the anxiety are based on values but not the facts of life.

            Now make no mistake about it, the news media very frequently get the facts wrong.  Most of the time, this will be straightened out and cause relatively little harm.  But what the news media do to distort our values and make us anxious and fearful and then depressed, borders on criminal.

            To make a case, several weeks ago, the cover story in Newsweek had to do with mad cow disease.  To this time, there is not even one case of mad cow disease developing in humans in the United States that we know of.  However, I see from the news today, that McDonald’s  hamburger sales have dropped 10% in Europe because of their fear of mad cow disease.  To this time, there haven’t been any cases of mad cow disease developing in people in Europe but for fear of this problem, many people in Europe have stopped eating beef altogether.

            Now compare this to the leading preventable cause of death in the United States which is cigarette smoking.  In the year 2000, cigarette smoking caused 300,000 deaths in the United States.  In that same issue of Newsweek, they devoted 8 pages to mad cow disease.  There wasn’t even one mention of 300,000 people dying from cigarette smoking.  Every year the population of Sioux Falls, SD, dies twice related to cigarettes.  Imagine driving into Sioux Falls and there is nobody there.  You go to the gas station and there is nobody in the place.  You go to a restaurant and there is no one to serve you.  The entire population of Sioux Falls has died and when you come back in six months, it’s died again.  That is how many people die from cigarette smoking each year and yet in the same issue of Newsweek that devoted eight pages to mad cow disease,  there wasn’t even one mention of cigarette smoking as being a preventable cause of death.  If it is understood that a neurosis originates from a distorted value system, then I submit that our news media create a distorted value system by emphasizing problems that don’t even exist.

            The medical profession frequently refers to something called “a neurotic symptom”.  A neurotic symptom can be thought of as something a person worries about that is of little consequence and specifically this symptom develops in the setting of a much bigger problem that the person is unable or unwilling to deal with.  Examples of neurotic symptoms are the headaches that develop when your wife or your child or your business don’t do what you want.  You can picture the poor people on Wall Street right now holding their heads with “splitting” headaches.  There is nothing wrong with their heads that wouldn’t be cured by a healthier stock market.  The pain in their head has nothing to do with a disease involving the brain,  the scalp or other parts of the head.  In other words, their head hurts because of a distortion of their value system.

            If you can follow my analogy, then very clearly our news media create neurotic symptoms in us.  No, not everybody in our society tumbles to the panic policy of the news media but enough people do that it changes the behavior of our entire society.  By the example above, because we are unwilling or unable to face our cigarette problem, we eat less hamburgers because of our worry about mad cow disease.  NOW  THAT IS  NEUROTIC.