6 minute read
HOW YOUR TV CAN MAKE YOU SICK
Exposing the danger of health myths in popular culture
by Toni Pahlke
“Not brushing your teeth can cause cavities” is one of many beliefs we all know to be true about our health. But some of those beliefs are established not by medical professionals, but by the media spreading and pushing medical myths. When those myths sneak their way into our “common knowledge” they can become very dangerous and stand in the way of you getting the treatment you need.
When observing health myths, you can define different reasons for the misinformation to spread and stick in popular culture. We will focus on three of them: trends, stigma and conspiracy theories. Here are a few important example myths within these categories that may have snuck their way into your medical knowledge.
Health trends
Just like your fashion sense and online presence, your health can fall victim to trends in pop culture. Up until the 1950’s, porcelain skin was a sign of beauty, health and wealth. Now, having a so-called “sun-kissed” complexion is associated with health and an active lifestyle. Tans are presented as attractive in pictures on social media platforms, fashion magazines offer advice on how to improve your tan and the most good-looking TV-characters have to have glowing, tanned skin.
The reality however is: there is no such thing as a “healthy tan”. The increase of melanin in your skin, caused by sun-exposure, is always a sign of damage.
It increases your risk of skin cancer, even if your skin doesn’t burn. Unfortunately, 28% of 18- to 26-year-olds don’t believe that tans can cause cancer. The obsession with tans has even produced tanning alternatives that cut the sun out of the equation entirely. While full body spray tans might be an excessive measure to achieve a beauty trend, they at least don’t damage the skin. Tanning beds, on the other hand, are arguably worse than just lying in the sun. Through emitting roughly 12 times more UVA light than sunlight, tanning beds cause significantly more damage to your skin than the sun.
That is a too big price to pay for a fashion trend.
Unprotected sun-exposure is always dangerous for your skin. So even though it’s understandable to want a tan as a souvenir from your beach holiday, consider buying a postcard instead. Keep in mind to wear sunscreen and stay in the shadow as much as possible.
Stigma
A stigma is a set of negative and unfair beliefs that a society has about something. Not only trends, but also the stigma surrounding certain topics can put your personal health at risk.
STDs (Sexually Transmitted Diseases) for one, are one of the most taboo healthcare topics in our culture, which causes a lack of education and therefore a lot of misinformation. For example, 60% of Greek youth report never testing for STDs or only if they notice symptoms. STDs like clamydia, ghonnorea and hepathitis B can be asymptomatic and go unnoticed until they’re passed on to a sexual partner. This shows a dangerous lack of awareness and unwillingness to confront the issue.
One STD that is heavily affected by stigma is HIV (Human immunodeficiency virus, can lead to AIDS). When HIV spread in the 80’s the medical field demonstrated a lack of care for patients, as the disease primarily affected homosexual men. Because of homophobia, the public as well as the medical field distan+ced themselves from the issue. This also put the greater population at risk because they didn’t prepare for the disease affecting heterosexual people as well.
These stereotypes about people with HIV are still heavily spread by the media, but in much more subtle ways than the diagram. In an analysis of 111 TV-characters with HIV, 82.9% of characters were male and 79.3% of characters were gay. This leads to heterosexual people still weighing themselves in a false sense of security regarding HIV, even though homosexual men only make up 41% of HIV-infections, while heterosexuals make up 29%. There’s only a small difference in infection rates, but a much higher percentage of homosexual men (84%) reports getting tested for HIV in comparison to heterosexuals (49%). This makes it more likely for the disease to be transmitted unknowingly and puts people at risk that don’t believe themselves to be a part of the risk group.
The stigma surrounding STDs, especially HIV, is still very present, even though western societies have progressed to be a lot more sex-positive. The stereotypes about STDs and people that have them are kept alive in the media and popular culture, making medical access and awareness harder for people who defy them.
Conspiracy theories
As with most conspiracy theories, medical conspiracies most commonly spread due to fear-mongering. They give the believers a “reasonable” explanation for a scary phenomenon that may otherwise be too complex to fully understand. One of the most well-known medical myths is the claim that vaccines cause autism. It is also a prime example for how quickly misinformation can spread and stick in the medical field as well as our culture.
In 1998, discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield published a study that claims to prove a link between the MMR vaccine and ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). The myth caught on incredibly quickly, providing the public with fear-inducing stories of suffering parents and their autistic children. Thousands of studies have since thoroughly disproved this theory, but the idea is still present in our culture: 64% of US-Americans don’t rule out vaccines as a cause for ASD, 21% of Greek people still feel that vaccinations are unsafe. This myth is so integrated into popular culture that media outlets still present it as fact. One popular piece of media that caused outrage is the US-American show “Eli Stone”. The first episode of this show about a charismatic lawyer has said lawyer win a lawsuit by “proving” a link between vaccines and ASD. To quote Eli Stone’s supposedly convincing argument:
“ Is there proof that [fictional vaccine] causes autism? Yes. Is that proof direct or incontrovertible? No. But ask yourself if you’ve ever believed in anything, in anyone without absolute proof, that’s called faith.”
This faith is the basis for most medical conspiracies. Just because something is presented as a well known fact, doesn’t mean the claim has any proof to back it up.
This is where faith comes in. Faith in information passed throughout your community or culture. The representation of certain trends or “pop science”, the mischaracterization & stigmatization of diseases and medical misinformation are all spread through television, social media and even news sources.
When the media pushes an idea so thoroughly and consistently, it appears to become a fact.
But nothing about your own personal health is undoubtedly true, unless you receive information from a medical professional. Don’t be tricked by what your brain believes to be a fact. You can not trace back where that belief came from. It could just be that your perception of health is influenced by trends, stigma or manipulative misinformation, which can ultimately endanger your personal well-being.
