Ask your Doctor!

Ask your Doctor is that engaging television health show you always wished for but never had.

Interactive by design, rich in professional medical advice and seamless in technical delivery Ask your Doctor is poised to revolutionize the scene of television health shows in Ghana in a far departure from the boringly predictable health shows that Ghanaians appear to be getting used to. This perhaps also marks the dawn of a robust activist response to the sometimes poisonous health misinformation that Ghanaians are constantly bombarded with on various media networks which play crucial roles in modifying health seeking behavior of the people and stagnating progress towards the achievement of Millennium Development Goal 4 by 2015.

It is indeed heartwarming to see the Ghana Medical Association broadening its agenda beyond the well documented labor focus. This ought not to have been surprising considering the philosophical under pinnings of the Association – namely that health is a right with the Association positioned to advance the best health interests of all the people of Ghana.

As part of the policy on building useful partnerships with like minded groups/individuals and engaging constructively with the media, the Association appears to have rolled out a number of initiatives one of which is Ask your doctor, a thrilling concept developed by FNB Consult, spearheaded by the multi tasking and public spirited Fiifi Banson and actively supported by the GMA. Ask your Doctor has the Camel antiseptic brand of PZ Cussons limited as the main sponsor.

If the broad majority of health ailments plaguing the populace can be managed in a preventive and health promotion frame, then perhaps the role of communication to positively influence healthy behavior has been undervalued. The reasons for this have been legion; inadequate engagement of qualified health professionals from an activist stand point, low prioritization of health among many media networks and sometimes among health professionals themselves, poor sponsorship especially for prime time slots, low prioritization, poor technical delivery, exorbitant price tags from managers of media houses who often assume any request to embark on health education, far from being voluntary, is spurred by nonexistent huge profits accruing to those requesting air time.

In its stead, we have been treated to the classical adage of he who pays the piper calling the tune. We have seen a surge in access of all manner of pretenders to the electronic media who as it were, have the financial wherewithal to commandeer hours on end. Easily able to afford the exorbitant fees charged by some of these media outlets, they appear to have priced proactive medical doctors out of the health education market.

To worsen matters, a lot of media owners appear to have the wrong notion that whenever doctors, at least from some experiences of the health education and advocacy unit of the Ghana Medical Association have volunteered their services by way of public health education, that these public spirited doctors could not possibly be using their own resources for this exercise free of charge. Often the assumption had been that we were beneficiaries of some astounding financially muscled benefactor. There had to be some big albeit concealed sponsor doling out cash for such studio appearances. In its absence, many such opportunities to educate the public have been aborted.

And yet the need to penetrate the darkness of ignorance and disastrous health outcomes with the light of undisputed knowledge cannot be overstated. Right from the middle of the capital Accra, doctors have encountered women who gave generous doses of malt drink to manage children suffering from anemia secondary to severe malaria. In other instances, pureed tomato has come to aid the anemia situation. Babies are dying from neonatal sepsis because cow dung has been given pride of place in cord dressing. Other times, despite what may pass for normal in a new born baby with three or more days of non-bowel action, many mothers out of sheer concern have given good doses of enema which instead of spurring the anticipated bowel action, has stimulated colitis and many times, the eventual death of the baby!

Women in some parts are coming into hospitals at very late stages of labor in order to reduce the time spent in hospitals because prolonged stay is deemed to reflect difficult labor – a direct consequence of marital infidelity. I have personally heard on one television station, a herbal practitioner declare that “you get typhoid fever if you walk outside with dirty socks” and this despite well documented evidence that the transmission of typhoid is feco-oral. In other words, if you contract typhoid, then surely, you would have consumed some human excreta!

A woman has visited my consulting room at the point of death from excessively bleeding uterine fibroids with a complicated heart failure. As it turned out, the bleeding had been on going for months and the only reason she had not sought care earlier was the assurance given her that the herbal concoction she was consuming was “causing the fibroid to melt” evidenced by the heavy blood clots!

And so Ask your Doctor will not just talk about fibroid. It will take you to the theatre to see an actual operation. It will show you the fibroid nodules and you can judge for yourself whether or not melting is anywhere on the agenda! It would talk to real patients, show real vox pops, tackle real issues and would be hosted by a team of doctors led by the talented young and media trained DoctorTitus Beeyuo.

Beyond this, it needs to be asked how it is that many media houses have so easily offered powerful platforms for misinformation to be constantly spewed forth to the unsuspecting public instead of being strategically deployed to positively influence health behavior and constantly attack the twin evils of ignorance and poverty.

Having had the opportunity to conduct numerous verbal post mortems, it never ceases to amaze me the number of times a child or adult dies simply because appropriate care has not promptly been sought at the first sign of ill health. Rather parents comb a great many number of alternates till final arrival in many clinics at the point of death.

How is it that a child having repeated febrile convulsions from complicated malaria “has to wait for the father” before being sent to a prayer camp, followed by concoctions and other preparations before finally reaching the clinic or health centre for the highly subsidized Artesunate- Amodiaquine and other combination therapies at two Ghana cedis? By this time of course, the matter is almost hopeless, leaving facility mortality statistics the richer for it.

And it is not as if the Medical Association has sat unconcerned. Letters have been massively circulated to many media outlets announcing the formation of a new Health Education and Advocacy unit led by the indefatigable Dr Ernest Kenu and supported by Dr Winfred Baah who are coordinating the efforts of a team of GMA doctors on constant stand by to avail their professional services free of charge to members of the Ghanaian public.

Mention must however be made of the Graphic Health page, a collaborative effort between the Daily Graphic and the health education and advocacy unit of the GMA that sees educative health articles being published every Wednesday. And then there are the doctors in the various regions on constant stand by to provide regular health education in the various regions via regional and community radios.

Coming readily to mind is the hugely successful collaboration with the Western region-based Kyzz FM that birthed a one week pro health onslaught. Accra’s Citi and Kumasi’s Angel FM stations have in fact been given special awards by the Ghana Medical Association in respect of the prime time treatment these stations have given to health education and other health related issues. It is hoped that the Association will continue to scan the media landscape in order to celebrate those that have positioned themselves to positively, significantly and sustainably alter the health fortunes of our people.

Combating health misinformation with adverse outcomes will certainly take the combined efforts of medical professionals, the media and community opinion leaders etc working in synergy to roll out a sustained campaign through social activism to positively alter long held stereotypes.

Ask your Doctor airs live every Saturday at 500pm on Ghana Television. For the individual conflicts, the ethical/moral dilemmas, the policy and legal dimensions, appropriate clinical care for patients in need of safe abortion care, catch the next episode this Saturday.

Sodzi Sodzi-Tettey

Visit the writer’s blog at www.sodzisodzi.com

1-07-2011