T.V. producer speaks on legal awareness

On any given Tuesday night, detectives Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson light up the television screens of more than 10 million American households as they catch serial rapists, find abandoned children and rescue women from the hands of con-artists.

This fictional crime fighting team on NBC's Law and Order: SVU, however, does more than simply provide entertainment for its audience.

Last Tuesday, Neal Baer, the executive producer of Law and Order: SVU and former executive producer of the hit television series ER, spoke at Johns Hopkins as part of the Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium.

The MSE Symposium is a 37-year-old lecture series that this year centers on the changing nature of American media.

Baer's lecture focused on the relationship between Hollywood and medicine and how Law and Order: SVU is a vehicle for increasing medical and legal awareness.

For him, the link between Hollywood and medicine is pure storytelling. "Storytelling and medicine are passions that are inextricably linked in my life," he told the audience on Tuesday. "To be a good doctor, I believe, requires one to be a very good storyteller."

Baer, who attended the American Film Institute before he went to Harvard Medical School, has clearly mastered the art of storytelling. And storytelling, he said, has let him empathize with patients better, be a better listener, and ask good questions.

While storytelling has allowed him to be a better doctor, the relationship is not unidirectional. In his third year at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Baer had a curious case that taught him a little bit about storytelling. The patient, a seemingly healthy man who was admitted for chest pains, later turned out to have leukemia. The complexity of the man's disease and the importance of learning his case history led Baer to see parallels with storytelling.

"He taught me to tell stories with depth and detail, to look for twists and turns that can reveal stunning answers."

Once Baer realized how close storytelling and medicine were, the leap to Hollywood was not far. Now, Baer is adamant about the fact that more doctors should do what he does: spread awareness through the media.

"I believe our duties as physicians do not lie only in the operating room," he said Tuesday. "Can our patients' stories increase public awareness?" he rhetorically asked the audience. "I believe they can."

According to a 2001 poll of ER viewers conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Baer has certainly done a good job spreading awareness.

The Kaiser poll showed that before an ER episode focusing on the link between human papilloma virus (HPV) and cervical cancer, only nine percent of ER viewers could give the correct definition of HPV, while, after the episode aired, 28 percent could define it.

Themes he mentioned on Tuesday night that have been presented in his shows included organ shortages, sexually transmitted diseases in teenagers, methamphetamine abuse in gay communities and stem cell research.

When Baer hears about a timely medical topic that interests him, he writes a show about it. For example, a nationally renowned scientist recently told him about a study published last May in the journal Science suggesting that violence is contagious, like an infectious disease. The wheels in Baer's head started churning and the story that resulted will be airing on Law and Order: SVU a few weeks from now.

Critics of crime and medical dramas like ER, Law and Order and CSI are quick to point out that these shows, while providing some real medical or legal information, are also full of scenes and situations which would never arise in a real hospital, courtroom or crime scene.

For example, medical dramas often show interns tentatively helping perform surgeries on their first day in the hospital, an unrealistic situation that could scare real-life patients away from surgery.

Baer, however, does his best to present reality. "I don't think about educating, and I don't think about entertaining," he said. "I think about telling good stories."

"Each of you has a private story to tell," he said. "A story that has gripped you, changed the way you view the world, moved you to tears. Use your own life to change the world."