The Public Eye Chat With… Dr. Jonathan LaPook And Mary Hood
Brian Montopoli: How hard is it to be a practicing doctor and a journalist at the same time?
to listen to the interview.
Dr. Jonathan LaPook: I'm still trying to figure it out. I feel like the guy on the Ed Sullivan Show…he used to spin plates. And there were like seven or eight plates on the stage, and they would play fast, furious music, and he went over and he would spin plate after plate after plate…the idea was to keep all the plates spinning. I think keeping all the plates spinning has been the challenge.
One of the big discussions I had with Sean [McManus] and Rome [Hartman] was how to do both jobs responsibly. You don't want to be doing medicine with one hand tied behind your back. You want to it have all your attention. So what we decided was that I would stop seeing any new patients. So I froze my practice. And then that would allow me to free up time to come to CBS. And we sort of worked it so I was dividing my time between CBS and my practice.
Brian Montopoli: So in an average week your time is equally divided?
Dr. Jonathan LaPook: It was supposed to be 50/50. The idea was that my last patient was going to leave the office at 2:00 on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday and all Thursday was going to be CBS. How it's turned out is – nature of the beast, there's a breaking story, suddenly I have to go crash a piece, so I've been juggling the schedule around.
And the truth is, at the beginning, there was a lot I didn't know. I've never done a job like this before. One of the reasons that I did it was I loved the idea of staying high on the learning curve. But the downside of that was that I didn't really know a whole lot about TV journalism, or journalism, starting out. And people were very kind here bringing me up to speed. But I wanted to come in running, and I also wanted to show people, look, I'm serious about this, I wasn't being a dilettante, and put the hours in.
So I came in at the beginning and I really burned the midnight oil. And I was up late reading and working and trying to bring myself up to speed. So I think at the beginning it really wasn't 50/50 – it was probably 75/25, CBS to medical. But the extra time at CBS was not coming at the expense of the medicine. I was just spending more hours in the day doing CBS.
Brian Montopoli: How do your patients feel about the fact that you're a journalist now?
Dr. Jonathan LaPook: The most common fear has been – I got a bunch of phone calls, people saying "Are you stopping being a doctor? Are you still going to be my doctor?" That was the big concern…once they realized I was still going to be a doctor, and that I still had time for them, and that I was still responding to their emails and all that, I think people were actually kind of happy for me.
And I'm probably a better doctor now because of this job. Because I'm reading 20, 30 articles a day to try to keep up…so I actually know a lot more now than I did 6 months ago about the latest and the greatest.
Brian Montopoli: When you guys are putting together these stories – there's always a concern about medical stories that you don't want to over hype them. Are there terms you try to avoid? Is there a particular strategy? How do you guys deal with these issues?
Mary Hood: There are certain words that we try to avoid at all costs, like breakthrough, potential breakthrough, cure, victim…we also try to do due diligence, like to not do any stories that are just centered on rat studies and mice. We want to see that it's tested in humans and also that it's going to be a treatment that's available to people. We try to go into overkill on reading every single journal, and talk to other doctors to get another point of view.
Just because something's published in the New England Journal of Medicine doesn't mean that other doctors don't have some criticism, and so we try to do our own reporting in that way, and not just take everything at face value. And that's where Jon's expertise really comes in too.
Brian Montopoli: From a doctor's perspective – not from a journalist's perspective – is there anything that drives you crazy?
Dr. Jonathan LaPook: I don't like it when they get the facts wrong. (Laughs) It happened with the HPV story. They just got the numbers wrong…I spent hours on the phone with the lead author of the study about it, and then we saw it being covered, and it was sorta done wrong.
I don't like it when people try to – the things that Mary said we should try to avoid. Our job should be to present things in the exactly perfect perspective. That's what we bring to the table. People get their information, they get their news, from the Internet these days. And what they come to us for, on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, is to get perspective. To figure out what to do with this data. How do you take information and turn it into knowledge? And so it bugs me when people blow things out of proportion because they're trying to hype a story or get viewers, because that's misinformation. That's miscommunication.