Showing the docs what’s up
Dr Christian Jessen tells Jack van Beynen how Embarrassing Bodies has improved medicine.
Dr Christian Jessen hated medical school. Not just hated it; hated it. Not the actual doctoring – he loved tending to patients, figuring out what ailed them. Jessen hated the stuffy confines of what he calls ‘‘the profession’’.
‘‘It’s a very traditional, stuffy, slowto-change profession,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s quite homophobic, quite racist – or was, let me say was. This was quite a long time ago. And I never really fitted into that, I was always slightly eccentric and probably very stubborn and pigheaded and quite individual. I wasn’t very good at towing the party line and doing the thing everyone else did at medical school.’’
One example: the tradition of doctors examining their patients from the left side of the bed. Jessen is lefthanded. It was easier for him, and better for the patient, to work from the right side of the bed. But if he’d done so in a test, he would have failed it.
‘‘That was one of the nonsensical, stupid, traditional things that I think actually hinders giving the best care to the patient, it doesn’t help it,’’ he says.
‘‘But you would literally fail your medical exams if you did that, and that was the sort of thing that I thought, this is utter, utter rubbish, and I’m going to change this.’’
Changing ‘‘the profession’’ became one of Jessen’s career goals and one that’s played into his work on television’s Embarrassing Bodies.
Embarrassing Bodies is confronting television. It’s a medical reality series where members of the public share their health issues with the show’s doctors, who recommend treatment with production sometimes footing the bill. The focus is on conditions that are hard to talk about. A third nipple is tame; try unpixellated footage of anal warts.
The show has been a big success since its UK debut in 2007, running for eight seasons and numerous specials. But it’s attracted plenty of criticism too, with reviewers calling the show ‘‘morally indefensible’’ and accusing it of encouraging viewers to laugh at people with sometimes serious medical conditions.
Jessen, who has been with the show since day one, says some of the most vociferous criticism came from within the medical fraternity – ‘‘the profession’’.
‘‘Unsurprisingly, but very disappointingly, the biggest amount of c..p I got back was from my colleagues,’’ he says.
He thinks other doctors took such a strong exception to the show when it
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At medical school, he’d been taught the old adage of ‘‘Don’t take your work home with you’’. His tutors wanted him to deal with his patients with a kind of detached coldness. Now, Jessen thinks that’s ‘‘bullc..p’’.
‘‘I think if you don’t lie in bed and think about that difficult patient that you’re not sure what’s wrong with them, if you don’t sit there and think, ‘Have I actually done the right thing,’ you’ve not done your job properly and you’re not engaged,’’ he says.
With Embarrassing Bodies, Jessen wanted to make medicine a little more human. Part of that was inviting audiences to have a giggle at some of the conditions.
‘‘That’s so important, because people do people do sit at home and giggle about various things they read about, and people sit in sex ed lessons at school giggling about willies or whatever it is, and to think that doctors don’t is just silly and unhelpful,’’ he says.
‘‘That’s what I mean about trying to make medicine a little bit more human. When something’s funny you laugh, and when something’s sad you – well, you don’t literally cry, but you acknowledge it. That’s fine. I think it’s the holding everything in and the stiff upper lip and pretending everything’s Westminster Abbey. She also recalls what took place when her father, King George VI, was crowned in 1937. all right, I think that’s far more exhausting and upsetting than riding the ride with the patient, you know.’’
That approach seems to be a hit with patients. Jessen says some people come to the show with problems they’re not comfortable speaking to
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While last year’s Oscars victory was perhaps overshadowed by the political storm surrounding Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s decision not to attempt to travel to the ceremony, there’s no their own GP about because they feel they ‘‘know’’ the show’s doctors from watching them on television.
He hopes the show is also having an influence, however small, on how doctors interact with their patients.
‘‘Certainly young doctors I’ve talked to now who sort of grew up with Embarrassing Bodies as their weekly TV fodder are a very different breed from the doctors who used to teach me, I’m very glad to say. I can’t claim all the credit for that, but I really hope that we played some part in that, I really do,’’ Jessen says.
"Unsurprisingly, but very disappointingly, the biggest amount of crap I got back was from my colleagues." Dr Christian Jessen
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