Hollywood just doesn't make movie doctors like they used to

A review of films shows that doctors are not often depicted in a favorable light.

By Damon Adams, AMNews staff. Jan. 24, 2005.

In the good old days of the silver screen, this was the movie face of a physician: a dreamy Elvis Presley working as a family physician in a free clinic in New York City. As Dr. John Carpenter in the 1969 film "Change of Habit," the King tends to the medical needs in a rough part of the city and jams with community youths until duty calls.

Much like Elvis in his later years of flab-packed jumpsuits, the movie image of physicians has gone to pot. It has come to this: In 1997's "Critical Care," one physician asks another why a comatose patient with a poor prognosis needs a procedure. The response: "It's called revenue! He's got catastrophic health insurance."

That's showbiz.

Movies nowadays often cast physicians in a less attractive light than earlier films that showed them as more compassionate and idealistic, says Wisconsin pediatrician Glenn Flores, MD. Dr. Flores has rented and watched about 150 films spanning 80 years to gauge how physicians are depicted in films. In an article in the December 2004 Archives of Disease in Childhood, Dr. Flores says money and materialism are common themes in movies about doctors. Movie physicians base treatment decisions on a patient's ability to pay, and they are hampered by inefficient bureaucracies and health care systems.

"In the early decades, you see movie doctors often placing more lofty aspirations and altruism over materialism. Now you see more doctors as egotistical and uncaring," said Dr. Flores, associate professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin and director of its Center for the Advancement of Underserved Children.