Dear television, Educate Better.

As we talked in class last Thursday about the ways media, particularly television programming, can teach viewers sexual health-related information, I couldn't stop myself from wondering what sorts of health-related information I've learned from the television media I consume. Like, did I learn that people who believe they are having a heart attack should take aspirin from Private Practice or in school? I truly don't know. These thoughts led me to wonder what Grey's Anatomy, a show I've seen almost every episode of, has taught me about health and inspired me to google (yes, it can be a verb) "Grey's Anatomy and health information." What I found was a study conducted in 2008 that was very similar to Rebecca Collins' "Entertainment Television as a Healthy Sex Educator: The Impact of Condom-Efficacy Information in an Episode of Friends." Except this time, the study focused on HIV-related information, not condom efficacy. Here's the clip from Grey's Anatomy:

What you see is Izzie, a doctor at the Seattle-based hospital, explaining to an HIV-positive female patient that she does not need to have an abortion out of fear of passing on HIV, because there is a 98% chance of having a healthy baby with modern medicine. While the title of the clip suggests this is a pro-life video, it really is just Izzie informing a patient who has wanted a child that she can have a baby without fear of passing on HIV. 

The script and information for this episode were actually planned in association with the Kaiser Family Foundation, an organization that wanted to research how Grey's Anatomy could increase viewer's awareness of health information. This script was carefully written and planned by a few professional doctors and writers from the show to test if viewers would learn a generally unknown fact about HIV after watching the show. What they found was that "the proportion of viewers who were aware that, with the proper treatment, there is more than a 90% chance of an HIV-positive woman having a healthy baby increased by 46 percentage points after the episode aired (from 15% to 61%)" (Rideout, 2009). This is pretty astounding considering how well the show taught viewers a sexual-health related fact that arguably goes undiscussed most of the time because of stigma and lack of sexual-health related information in media. And as mentioned earlier, author Rebecca Collins found similar results in her study about the show Friends. 

Collins and her colleagues found that after viewing an episode of Friends that included information about condom efficacy, "15-30% of viewers remembered that condoms were said to be between 95-100% effective after watching the Friends episode" (2003). This particular episode had two male characters say the fact, "condoms are only 97% effective" multiple times. 

Both of these studies demonstrate how the media can act as an influential educator in peoples' lives. Yet, even with these examples out there, studies show that television media often does not purposefully set out to educate viewers about health or sexual health. In my opinion, this is a serious downfall on part of television producers and writers, who have the power to positively and accurately educate audiences but often choose not to. As we have discussed in class, media often acts as a super-peer in young adolescents' lives and by not setting out to include accurate health and sexual health information, the media is not being the responsible super-peer that many people could use in their lives. 

References: 

Collins, R. L., Elliot, M. N., Berry S. H., Kanouse, D. E., & Hunter, S. B. (2003). Entertainment television as a healthy sex educator: The impact of condom-efficacy information in an episode of Friends. Pediatrics, 112(5), 1115-1121. 

Rideout, V. (2008). Television as a health educator: A case study of Grey's Anatomy. A Kaiser Family Foundation.