Monday PSA: Dr. Kildare Reminds You to Get Your Annual Check-Up!
Keeping with the theme of Flashback Week, here is a PSA from the inside back cover of Dr. Kildare #5 (March – May 1963) encouraging eveyone to get regular physical check-ups. (Click on the image for the full PSA.)
It’s an interesting PSA for a number of reasons. First, the technology. Apparently in-office fluoroscopy (x-ray) was recommended for a regular physical, exposing the patient (and the doctor, if you look at the picture) to unnecessary radiation. While there isn’t that much radiation in an x-ray, the amount does add up and you try to avoid them except when absolutely necessary. Also the odds of finding anything abnormal in a random x-ray of a healthy patient is quite low, and anything you find is likely to be a false positive (requiring more tests and x-rays).
The “cardiogram” seems to only have a single lead. This would be fine for looking at the heart rhythm, and it may detect heart damage if it’s in the right place, but it won’t tell you much more. Today’s 12-lead EKGs give a vastly superior idea of what’s going on in the heart and allows us to better localize damage or injury to the heart.
Second, despite this PSA’s insistence that everyone needs regular physicals, there’s heated debate today about how necessary routine physicals actually are. There’s conflicting views: on one hand, physicals aren’t very cost effective. On the other hand, preventative medicine is being stressed more, and it’s hard to perform good preventative medicine without a periodic medical examination. My opinion falls somewhere in the middle of the two camps.
Finally, I can’t help but notice the second to last line: “Everyone, husband, wife or child, has a moral obligation to stay in good physical condition.” Sure, it would make my job so much easier (and the nation’s health care expenditures so much lower) if everyone did feel an obligation to stay in good condition, but the statement strikes me as a little fascist. Plus it smacks of Mary Baker Eddy — are those who get sick somehow less moral?
August 15th, 2006 at 9:09 am
As for the technical aspects of the psa, how much of this do you think is just plain writer/artist ignorance, as opposed to the state of medical technology of the early 60s?
August 15th, 2006 at 9:24 am
Official Comment
From my research, the PSA pretty accurately reflects the technology and medical standard of care of the early 1960s. This is one of the reasons I like looking back at these old books to see how much things have changed in the medical field in the last forty to fifty years. Not just in terms of technology, but also in terms of attitude and beliefs. For instance, there was one story in M.D. #3 where the patient’s mother is blamed for his sled accident and subsequent surgery (she was too overprotective). I can’t see that happening as easily today.
August 15th, 2006 at 10:24 am
Not everyone is a husband, wife, or child either. Did the writer assume everyone’s married by the time they reach adulthood?
August 19th, 2006 at 11:37 pm
I suppose the “moral obligation” thing is that if you don’t make an effort to stay healthy, you’re more likely to be a burden on others (family, employer, society at large…) through illness which could have been avoided.
Which makes sense. If, say, a man knowingly has poor hygiene and nutrition and often gets sick, then his coworkers are having to pick up the slack from missed work, his spouse may have to work more to make up for lost income, and the household may be spending money on healthcare which is needed for other things. If the guy doesn’t change his ways, then yeah, I’d say that’s not moral behavior.
If, on the other hand, the guy is looking after himself, then if he eventually gets sick it was probably unavoidable, thus carries no moral fault.
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