By: Albertus Magnus
Re: NBC's Cure-ious Program

           From _Forbes Media Critic_, Winter 1995

                          Cure-ious
                      by Greg Gutfield

LIGHTNING CRACKLES AGAINST the night sky. A giant, godlike
hand reaches through parted clouds to touch the outstretched
hand of man. A painting by Michelangelo? A movie by Cecil B.
DeMille? No, it's an ad in _TV Guide_ touting an upcoming
special: "_CURED!_ Secrets of Alternative Healing. Miracle
Cures! Watching this show could save your life!"
     Whether or not _CURED!_ actually saved the lives of any
viewers, it could hardly be described, as an NBC spokesper-
son put it, as a "factual" survey of treatments known collec
tively as alternative medicine. In fact, Paul Klein, the pro
ducer of the show, which NBC aired prime-time on July 5,
told _MediaCritic_ that _CURED!_ was biased in favor of the
practices it related: herbal treatments, acupuncture,
mind-body healing, homeopathy, and other alternative
treatments.
     "Everything has a point of view," Klein says. That NBC
would be willing to broadcast such an admittedly slanted
show--and more fundamentally, as scrutiny of _CURED!_
demonstrates, such a journalistically reckless one--says
much about how far the quest for ratings can shape
programming.
     To produce _CURED!_, Klein hired actors to reenact five
episodes in which patients found relief or a "cure" through
alternative therapies. One might be willing to abide such
reenactments, notwithstanding the infamous re-creation of
the explosion of a certain General Motors pick-up truck
(also on NBC), but for one problem: The authenticity of
these reenactments is doubtful.
     Klein says he purchased the stories from popular
magazines (though he was vague on which magazines those
were) as well as from people claiming to have been cured
through alternative therapy.
     Assuming Klein really found these stories somewhere, he
admits to fiddling with them. "We changed them around" he
says, adding that he mixed details from several anecdotes in
order to make one story. "Combinations" is how he describes
these manufactured tales. "Everyone does that."
     But neither the ostensibly "real-life" medical doctors
involved in the stories nor their patients were interviewed
on _CURED!_ to verify what supposedly happened.
     _CURED!_ also presented its stories without mentioning
that recovery does not by itself demonstrate the efficacy of
a treatment, whether alternative or conventional. Pinning
down cause and effect is difficult, a point an unbiased
producer would have included in the show. "Many things, like
the natural recovery of the body or the placebo effect, may
actually be responsible," says medical historian James
Harvey Young.
     Take, for example, the story Klein presented in which a
middle-aged fly-fisherman is cured of asthma. In a rustic
river setting, the fisherman suffers an acute attack as his
terror-stricken daughter looks on. They rush to the home of
a crusty, backwoods homeopath, who instructs the fisherman
to swallow a remedy derived from the tissue of a tubercular
cow. The asthma soon disappears and everyone is happy and
healthy. What the narrator fails to mention, however, is
that the cure could easily have been a spontaneous
remission, which often occurs as asthma sufferers get older.
     Other stories presented on _CURED!_ begged obvious but
never-asked questions. Consider the tale of Rocky, a
springer collie who suffered from a herniated disc. A
"mainstream veterinarian" advises that it is time to destroy
the dog. This counsel distresses the little boy who owns
Rocky. But homeopathy saves the day. In a fit of
desperation, Rocky is taken to a "holistic veterinarian" who
gives the dog diluted doses of belladonna, an otherwise
lethal herb. After two doses Rocky is playing Frisbee,
apparently cured. The little boy is ecstatic. Not once in
this drama was there any discussion of how or even whether
the therapy worked. X-rays before and after treatment might
have documented an improvement, but nothing as scientific as
X-rays was presented.
     The list of problems with _CURED!_ includes its
distortion of history.  At one point the show offers viewers
Hippocrates speaking on the wonders of homeopathy while
lounging around a pool eating an apple. J. Worth Estes, a
pharmacology professor at the Boston University School of
Medicine, says this and similar historical re-creations are
ludicrous. "Homeopathy was invented in the 1790s in Germany.
Although Hippocrates may have felt a doctor should help the
body recover on its own terms, it's a total distortion to
call that homeopathy," he says.
     In another segment the narrator tells viewers that one
quarter of all drugs originated from plants. "It's more like
35 out of 7,000," says Estes. "Obviously, somebody at NBC
was not minding the store when this nonsense got sneaked
by."
     The show aired the views of both proponents and critics
of alternative medicine. But this turned out to be a false
balance. Critic Jack Raso, editor of _Nutrition Forum_, says
that when he was first contacted for an interview, he was
told the program would be a fair examination of various
alternative practices. Dr. Saul Green, a noted biochemist
critical of unconventional medicine, says he was told the
same "But later when I heard the title [_CURED!_]--and I am
not joking--I was aghast," says Green.
     All but a few of his and Raso's critical remarks were
edited out. "It ended up being a tedious collection of
mini-docudramas canonizing these therapies," says Raso.
     Green and Raso overestimated the show's interest in
balance. It turns out that critics were not interviewed to
provide balanced discussion, but to raise viewer bile. "When
I saw the program, it was confirmed," says Green. "I was
used."
     Reinforcing its bias toward alternative therapies,
_CURED!_ fully identified alternative practitioners while
failing to point out that Raso, Green, and other critics are
members of the board of directors of the National Council
Against Health Fraud. The program even went so far as to
show viewers how to get in touch with alternative
practitioners.
     Where in the world did this strange program come from?
Not, as it happens, from the news division of NBC. The
network bought the program from an outfit called PKO
Television. Klein, PKO's president as well as producer of
_CURED!_, says that NBC purchased the program from him
because "all of the shows in that time slot were failing"--
meaning they weren't delivering the audience the network had
guaranteed advertisers. Klein does not try to defend the
show as factual. In fact, he thinks that some of the
therapies discussed on _CURED!_ are, as he told
_MediaCritic_, "sh-t," though one couldn't tell this from
viewing the show. "We weren't doing an educational program,"
he says. "We were doing it as entertainment."
     The implicit understanding here is that if something is
entertainment, then producers need not worry about facts,
balance, and other such burdensome journalistic standards
and practices.
     Roz Weinman, vice-president of standards and practices
at NBC, shares this understanding. In an interview, she ap
peared irritated that the program should be scrutinized in
terms of commonly accepted standards. "There didn't need to
be any factual accounts because the program wasn't about
conventional medicine," she says. When asked whether someone
at the network should have examined published research on
homeopathic remedies, she replies, "We don't even do that
level of checking on a news program." Weinman says the
network met all its "responsibilities," noting that it even
had a medical doctor review the show, though she couldn't
recall the physician's name.
     Did NBC meet its responsibilities to the viewing public
and to the issues presented by alternative medicine?
     When a network devotes two hours of prime-time to a par
ticular subject, a viewer is inclined to think there must be
a good reason for that decision. _CURED!_ presented
alternative medicine as an attractive complement to
conventional medicine, which it characterized as heartless
and out of touch. Though NBC included a disclaimer at the
top of the show indicating that the network was not
endorsing the practices that were highlighted on _CURED!_,
this prefatory text was contradicted by the pictures and the
unmistakable message conveyed by the program as a whole.
     Like other newsworthy topics, alternative medicine de
serves examination according to the accepted standards of
journalism. To "do it as entertainment," as Klein said, is
to demean it and to condescend to the viewing audience.
Perhaps the best news to report about _CURED!_ comes from
Klein himself, who says the ratings stunk. Let that fact be
noted by the network wizards the next time they go slumming
for viewers.

[Greg Gutfield is a senior writer at Rodale Press, Emmaus,
Pennsylvania.]