Shen-Han Lee

This morning, I nearly coughed and spluttered on my cup of coffee when I saw an article in The Star (a Malaysian daily), reporting a study conducted by some doctors in Barcelona, Spain, comparing the looks of physicians, surgeons and film stars who portray these medical practitioners in medical dramas on TV. The best part of this study is that it was actually published in the British Medical Journal!! (Impact factor 9.052 as of 2006!)

Amused, I decided to check out the original article from BMJ. Indeed, reading Trilla et al. (2006) on this issue of BMJ is certainly more entertaining than any of those research articles from Nature, Science, PNAS, JCI, JAMA or even NEJM! (NB: apologies to readers who don’t know these abbreviations. They are names of respectable and higly-cited scientific and medical journals. I’m just too lazy to type their names in full)

For those of you who are interested, you can download a pdf version of Trilla et al. (2006) directly from this link

Intersting points to note from this ‘seminal’ paper:

 1) Surgeons are the only doctors who practice what has been called “Confidence-based medicine”, which is based on boldness.

2) Surgeons are significantly taller and better looking than their physician counterparts. However, film stars who play doctors get the highest ratings, when compared with real-life surgeons and physicians. The latter ‘finding’ does not really come as a surprise – after all, they are film stars; good looks are part of their bread and butter, besides acting skills (or the lack thereof, in some cases).

The authors of the paper attributed the increased height of surgeons as an evolutionary advantage. Increased height persumably makes surgeons more likely to be ‘masters and commanders’, being able to have a better view of and therefore exert tighter control of their natural turf – the operating theater. Physicians, on the other hand, are not usually surrounded by so many people in their ‘habitat’ – the patient’s bedside. They tend to be shorter possibly due to the fact that they tend to hang stetoscopes round their necks, thus weighing them down, causing them to bow their head slightly forward and have a decreased perceived height.

My take: this paper is obviously done in a light-hearted spirit. Maybe it’s Christmas season. Maybe New Year’s just round the corner. Perhaps the authors were bored and had too much free time? (I doubt it. They’re doctors)

Or maybe they wanted to give people, especially those in the medical profession, something funny to read and laugh about. Looks like they succeeded. Now, if only more research articles were that amusing. Well, we’ll probably have to check out the Annals of Improbable Reasearch for more of those.