David and Christine discuss “Retro”, a recent episode of the prime time TV show, “Law & Order Special Victim’s Unit”, in which a false version of Christine’s life is used to send a supposedly true message about AIDS. Special guests include Robin Scovill, Christine’s real life husband of 12 years whose inexplicable HIV negative status causes him to be eliminated from fictionalized portrayals of his family as well as from most factual news articles. Also joining the show is Michael Ellner a hypnosis educator who calls television and movies “the most effective means for hypnosis”. News items include the use of voodoo priests to promote testing and treatment in Haiti, a 26% death rate found among Africans after starting HAART and a look at the Goudge inquiry, Canada’s investigation into pathological misconduct by a top coroner.
Summary of the Law & Order SVU episode ‘Retro’: http://beesight.com/law_and_order/law-and-order-svu-season-10-episode-5-recap-and-review-retro.html.
At the beginning of the show David and Christine discuss how AIDS researchers are trying to enroll voodoo priests in Haiti to encourage HIV testing and treatment but how the experience with treatment in one site in Africa has been a 26% death rate in the first year after starting drugs. Christine wonders how it can be that this massive death rate, which would be call for a drug recall in other domains, is always explained away or ignored with AIDS drugs. They finish the news segment with a discussion of Canadian pathologist Charles Smith who put many parents and other caregivers in jail by blaming a child’s death on them, decisions that have almost all been overturned by other experts.
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Congratulations, great episode. It was really nice with multiple guests and all the different perspectives. I wish we could also get to hear what the writers have to say, next time maybe…
For anyone who has not seen this episode, it is possible to find it via bittorrent.
http://www.mininova.org/tor/1957004
Also there is another very similarly themed episode from an E.R. episode from Season 12, Episode 9. The link below is a link to the entire set of all the E.R.s made thus far (I don’t know why on earth anyone would want that), but if you open it up in a torrent client (I suggest BitLord, free download), you can unselect all other episodes and choose only Season 12 Episode 9 and download it that way. It’s a bit tricky, but it is the only way I was able to track it down. Same story:
Single mom, two kids, no father, kid gets sick, mom is “irresponsible”, breaks down and cries at the end…very formulaic.
http://www.mininova.org/tor/1536942
I’m sure there are infinite numbers of other instances of this kind of myth insertion into popular tv shows and media. One can’t help but remember the movie Philadelphia for instance. Tom Hanks’ character has this huge emotional scene in the courtroom where he reveals his Caposi’s lesions all over his body, although, he is not depicted in the movie using any drugs, participating in anything but perfectly responsible behavior.
The power of the television is undeniable. What did Howard Beale say?
“This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation.
This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers.
This tube is the most awesome goddamn force in the whole godless world.”
And that’s an understatement… 🙂
The paper on a high death rate for HAART in Africa is:
Ciaranello AL et al. Antiretroviral drugs for preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa: balancing efficacy and infant toxicity. AIDS. 2008 Nov 12; 22(17): 2359–69. http://davidcrowe.ca/SciHealthEnv/papers/7226-HIV-Drugs-MTCT-MitochondrialToxicity.pdf
[…] much worse than I imagined. I hadn’t even seen the preview before. Here’s the related HPAY podcast: Episode 9: Science Fiction: Law & Order
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