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Home > Portable Practical Pediatrics > TV Harming Kid’s Health? (Pedcast)
Podcast: Portable Practical Pediatrics
Episode:

TV Harming Kid’s Health? (Pedcast)
Category: Kids & family
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2017-06-27 18:37:40
Description: Introduction Welcome to another edition of Portable Practical Pediatrics. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Smolen, a board certified pediatrician who has practiced pediatrics in Charlotte NC for the past 35 years. As I like to say, from the womb to the workplace, if it involves children, we talk about it here. Today, I'm going to tell you about a recent family experience I had and what it taught me about the potential negative influence of media, specifically television, on a viewer's health.  Charge up those mp3 players, put in those buds, and get ready for a fascinating edition of Portable Practical Pediatrics.  Musical Introduction A Real Life Story Don't believe that exposure to screens including TVs, iPads, and computers influence you and your children?  I think you need to reconsider that belief.  Recently, I got a real-life lesson in the effects of media consumption on illness while helping my 93-year-old mother, a passionate Democrat, recover from a small stroke that occurred the day after the 2016 presidential election. Her stroke a coincidence, you say? I thought so too, but I have become convinced otherwise. According to her doctors, the triggering event for my mother's stroke was severe hypertension--212/110 upon arrival at the ED. Needless to say, since her discharge and recovery, we have been monitoring her blood pressure carefully, and here is the strange thing I have noticed: her blood pressure while at home watching "cable news" is invariably high, but when we take her to a medical facility, away from the television, her blood pressure normalizes. I've coined a name for this phenomenon: "The Cable News Hypertension Syndrome" or CNHS. Simply watching cable news seems to cause my mother to develop a malignant spike in her blood pressure in a dose/response relationship. Apparently, the cable news outlets have mastered the art of provoking a strong emotional and hypertensive physical reaction from my mother. The Mind Body Connection How can exposure to images, music, sound effects, and dialogue cause such a strong physical response as to adversely affect someone’s health?  Hopefully, we have all heard of the severe and devastating effects of real-life adverse childhood experiences (or ACE factors) on a child's long-term health. A child exposed to ACE factors has been shown to have, on average, higher cortisol levels, higher blood pressure, higher sympathetic tone, and less well developed self control than a child who has not endured such exposure. Could exposure to emotionally charged events such as images of terrorism and war on TV, have the same deleterious influence on a child?  Could watching carefully crafted, emotionally charged television content have similar negative effects on children today as it seems to have on my mother who experiences the "Cable News Hypertension Syndrome"?  Of course it can. Evidence already exists that, in children between the ages of three and eight years of age, watching television has the effect of raising blood pressure, independent of whether the children are obese or not. Television became one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century because it is a medium that is capable of provoking strong emotional reactions from all of us.   Big Brother is Watching To make matters worse, the invention of the internet, social media, and big data has magnified the effect of media on all of us, especially our children.  In today's world, when your children "watch" something on TV, a website, or you tube, the producers of that content are measuring not only the size of their audience but often the emotional response of the audience to their content. They are tweaking their content to maximize its emotional and physical impact on viewership ultimately to attract benefit advertisers. Orwellian you say?  You bet. They are getting better and better at targeting their media content at people who are likely to respond emotionally to their message and continue to follow the mes...
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