Anyone want to give this a read and report back?
When Illness Goes Public: Celebrity Patients and How We Look at Medicine by Barron H. Lerner (Paperback – May 13, 2009)
Review from Booklist:
From Booklist
Today it’s commonplace for Carnie Wilson to chat about her gastric bypass surgery on talk shows or Sally Field to hype a drug by talking about her osteoporosis. Celebrities yapping about what ails them wasn’t always common, however, and Lerner believes that its prevalence now indicates cultural changes worth noting. Celebs have come to receive groundbreaking interventions previously -unknown to the general public, whether those consist of antibiotics, as in the case of Franklin Roosevelt Jr., or technological inventions, such as Barney Clark’s artificial heart, and to introduce them to the general public, causing thousands to then seek the new treatment. They also create connections to fellow sufferers who identify with and may be inspired by how a celebrity handles the same affliction. Benefits aside, Lerner cautions that there can be considerable drawbacks. After actor Steve McQueen chose alternative cancer treatments in Mexico, thousands flocked over the border seeking similar therapies and encountered similar failure. Others whose stories Lerner retells for his insightful analysis include athletes Jim Piersall and Arthur Ashe. Donna Chavez
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In some ways having a celebrity go public with an illness has been good. Look at the various people who are now getting help for eating disorders because of models and actresses who either struggled with various eating disorders or who have died of Anorexia like the late Karen Carpenter. It makes me mad when you have a situation like what happened to Farrah Fawcett when the tabloids get info from those parasites passing as hospital personnel who sold out and told the gossip rags stuff in her allegedly confidential medical records.
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