Health: The Document or The Documentary
During my last year in my undergraduate degree program we had a special event held on campus about the making of documentaries. I can’t say what drew me to this event, which student group it was organized by, or that I remember much of anything that was said about the technical details of making documentaries. All I remember from it was one thing that struck me and stuck with me ever since.
One of the three presenters on stage was a woman who worked on a number of documentaries. An audience member asked her:
“How do you ensure that your final cut gives a balanced, unbiased presentation of the subject you’re dealing with?”
In her response she recalled a documentary she made about a US politician where at the end of her raw footage collection she had over 100 hours in material. She admitted that she could’ve made him look like the most sinister politician you’ve ever seen or the most angelic one you could’ve imagined. He’s a human being after all, and as such, he was complicated. So she had to constantly remind herself and review the edits to make sure she related in the documentary the complexities of this politician as a human being in a way that didn’t portray him unfairly for the benefit of one side of the aisle over the other. Interestingly, she was still concerned about the prospect of her not having done such a good job at it and her documentary either vilifying or aggrandizing this politician unjustly. But hey…at least she tried.
In his 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, the social critic Neil Postman wrote:
“Stated in its simplest form, it is that television provides a new (or, possibly, restores an old) definition of truth: The credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition. ‘Credibility’ here does not refer to the past record of the teller for making statements that have survived the rigors of reality-testing. It refers only to the impression of sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability or attractiveness (choose one or more) conveyed by the actor/reporter.”
The current COVID-19 pandemic has amplified discourses that have largely been happening in isolated silos online. Given the democratization of platforms and equivocation between fragmented pieces of information about a topic and actual knowledge and expertise in the grand scheme of the subject matter under which that topic fits, many are voicing their contrarian opinions about all matters related to health and constantly rejecting anything related to either individual or public health that comes from medical professionals…unless of course, those professionals are already telling them what they want to hear then hey, they’re “speaking truth!”
I was recently listening to a podcast in which one of those with contrarian opinions who happens to have a large following, especially in the Muslim community, was being questioned about the sources of evidence for her claims. Her responses were always vague appeals about “many papers published” and “research that’s suppressed”. What are these “many papers” and who wrote them is never specified, and how she has such easy access to research that’s been suppressed is never clear. However, she did mention a couple of documentaries that “expose” the truth about what’s really happening.
Watching documentaries about something related to health is not “research”. Unless, of course, your research is on documentaries about health. Actual research on health entails a process of:
- Studying the physiology of what you’re looking into
- Studying logic so you understand how logical fallacies are committed generally and develop your skill at recognizing non sequitur arguments specifically
- Learning how to read scientific articles (yes, it’s not just about reading abstracts)
- Asking specific questions before you begin the lengthy process of going through primary literature and conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses that address those specific questions
- Become comfortable with asking “what am I missing?” and “what would disprove this?”
Rather than making you informed, documentaries will put you into an emotional state about a subject. The really powerful ones will have such an impact on you that even if you know the actual research, you’ll now find it challenging to trust your intellect.
The problem here is that your newly developed emotional state was not something you would’ve naturally developed had it not been for watching that documentary. In fact, before the documentary, your intuitive sense would’ve led you to develop better explanations for what was shown in the documentary had it not been for the framing the producer has constructed.
Back to Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death”:
“…in America everyone is entitled to an opinion… But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called *disinformation*. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information — misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented, or superficial information — information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing… I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”
May Allah grant us insight to recognize why we believe what we believe, how our beliefs are being shaped, and make us aspire and work towards developing rigorous intellects worthy of being inheritors of our predecessors so that we can be lights of guidance for the people in every field of knowledge.
Mohamed Ghilan earned a Ph.D. in Neuroscience in 2015 and is currently a 4th-year medical student. He is the founder of Al-Andalus Academy, an online learning platform delivering traditional Islamic teachings and an online book club where non-fiction books are explored and discussed through an Islamic lens during live webinars.
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