Enough with the pandemic porn
Enough is enough
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Your healthcare decisions are between you and your doctor and apparently his Twitter followers.
Indeed, of all the toxic trends that the coronavirus pandemic has unleashed in the United States, one of the worst is the fad where healthcare professionals trawl for attention with unflattering and likely embellished stories about their COVID-19 patients, trading the credibility of their community for a few minutes of viral fame. The only thing that makes this trend worse is that it has the blessing of a credulous news media.
An emergency physician in California, for example, scored online gold this week with an anecdote alleging he recently treated a suspected coronavirus patient adorned with various Nazi tattoos. The story as he tells it is obviously far-fetched. But you try telling that to the journalists who have helped elevate the doctor’s claims to viral stardom.
“He came in by ambulance short of breath,” tweeted physician and Bay Area native Taylor Nichols. “As we got him over to the gurney and his shirt off to switch [a] hospital gown, we all noticed the number of Nazi tattoos.”
“The swastika stood out boldly on his chest,” he continues. “SS tattoos and other insignia that had previously been covered by his shirt were now obvious to the room.”
The patient allegedly begged Nichols: “Don’t let me die, doc.”
“I reassured him that we were all going to work hard to take care of him and keep him alive as best as we could,” Nichols writes. “All of us being a team that included a Jewish physician, a Black nurse, and an Asian respiratory therapist. We all saw. The symbols of hate on his body outwardly and proudly announced his views. We all knew what he thought of us.”
He adds, “For the first time, I recognize that I hesitated, ambivalent. The pandemic has worn on me, and my mantra isn’t having the same impact in the moment. All this time soldiering on against the headwinds, gladiators in the pit.”
Nichols’s anecdote, which has been shared by more than 32,000 social media users, goes on like that for quite a bit. It is a winding, heroic tale of self-sacrifice and the tough moral dilemmas faced by our hero physician and his diverse team of equally heroic colleagues.
One minor hiccup with the story is that it is almost certainly heavily embellished, if not an outright falsehood. It is pandemic porn, which, like actual pornography, trades on fantasy.
For starters, there is the rather alarming fact that this is neither the first nor the second nor even the third time that Nichols has claimed to have treated a patient with Nazi tattoos. In February 2019, he tweeted about treating a patient with a “large swastika tattooed over his mid-chest.” Later, in May of the same year, he claimed that while in medical school, he was involved in performing "chest compressions on a middle-aged skinhead" who had a "large swastika tattooed over the middle of his chest." In June 2019, Nichols also recounted how he had treated an individual with a “large swastika tattoo and SS insignia tattoo … just the other day.”
Either Sacramento and the Bay Area have a Nazi infestation, or Nichols has an embellishment problem. It could be both, but that also seems somewhat unlikely.
Further, as a few social media users with keen memories have noted, Nichols’s viral thread is almost a note-for-note recitation of an episode of the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy.
Yet, despite all these possible red flags, Nichols is being hailed as a hero, his story repeated uncritically in the press, including in a soft-glow news report published this week by the San Francisco Chronicle. He is even being encouraged to submit his anecdote as an opinion article in the Atlantic and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Whatever happened to: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out”?
Perhaps Nichols is telling the truth. Perhaps there is an unusual number of Nazis in the San Francisco and Sacramento areas. After all, Nichols serves as a part-time doctor at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. That is about an 18-mile drive from San Quentin State Prison. He also works as an emergency room physician at Mercy San Juan Hospital, which is about a 10-mile drive from Folsom Prison. The nearby prison populations could account for the unusually high frequency with which Nichols reportedly encounters white supremacy symbols.
Perhaps it is also just a coincidence that his viral thread is an almost exact retelling of an episode of a popular TV show.
The problem here is not the possibility that Nichols's tale is a lie. People lie online all the time. Stop the presses. The problem is that Nichols's viral thread is the latest in a larger, more disturbing trend of healthcare workers reaping plaudits and praise from an uncritical news media for indulging the public with gossipy, tell-all anecdotes about supposedly rotten, mean, and ignorant pandemic patients. This trend needs to be stamped out for all the obvious reasons.
For starters, these dubious pandemic stories are at least a violation of the spirit of HIPAA, which is meant to serve as a safeguard for patients in their most vulnerable moments.
Second, anecdotes such as Nichols’s are certainly a violation of the Hippocratic oath, which states:
Whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients, whether in connection with my professional practice or not, which ought not to be spoken of outside, I will keep secret, as considering all such things to be private.
Lastly, these pandemic porn stories, if they are indeed falsehoods, may end up doing irreparable damage to one of the few remaining institutions that have not lost the public’s trust completely. And for what? The dopamine rush of likes and retweets on social media? An appearance on CNN?
If or when it comes out that the stories are fabrications, and it appears that at least two of the most recent viral anecdotes are, good luck putting that genie back in the bottle. The medical community, which plays an even greater role now than usual precisely because of the pandemic, will have to work hard to win back the public’s trust, and all because some rogue healthcare workers, with the help of a gullible press, tossed aside decades of tradition, professionalism, discretion, and credibility for some attention on social media.
No, really. Please.
We do not need another nurse or doctor running around on social media claiming to have selflessly and bravely administered care to racist and/or ignorant degenerates suffering from COVID-19. We do not need the press blindly promoting this self-serving, self-aggrandizing fad. Things are bad enough already as they are.