Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!Shiffman@SCH-GILA From: Shiffman%SCH-GILA@sri-unix.UUCP Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers Subject: E.T.: Phone For A Second Opinion Message-ID: <16640@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Mon, 13-Feb-84 11:59:00 EST Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.16640 Posted: Mon Feb 13 11:59:00 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 18-Feb-84 03:27:34 EST Lines: 163 From: Harris Shiffman>From the Los Angeles Times Calendar Section, 12 February 1984: E.T., You Should Have Phoned Home For A Second Opinion E.T could have sued for malpractice but he went home instead. Gentle, good and lovable E.T. didn't even contact a lawyer after he almost died on this planet in 1982, but some medical experts now think he probably had a good case against the doctors who treated him in Steven Spielberg's "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial". Seriously. Real-life doctors are making a fuss over the type of medical treatment E.T. received. Some emergency-medicine specialists think that doctors in the movie not only may have failed to recognize that E.T. could have been suffering from a drug overdose, but they apparently neglected a basic procedure that is taught to first-year medical students. A cheeky debate on the subject has been carrying on for more than a year in the letters column of the medical monthly Annals of Emergency Medicine. In the current issue, Dr. Alexander Lampone of St. John's Hospital of Santa Monica - the actor/doctor who headed the medical team that tended to the creature - defended his actions. But he did indicate some uncertainly, noting, "Well, how do you know what to give an alien from space?" If they had been sued by E.T., Lampone and his team certainly would have had a novel defense - one not seen in the average malpractice dispute. They say that they did everything that their colleagues claim they failed to do. But it actually was director Spielberg who endan- gered their professional reputation by editing out many of the most important steps in the battle to save E.T.'s life, they claim. It's an ancient lament in Hollywood that the actor's best perfor- mance was left somewhere on the cutting-room floor. But a doctor's? Spielberg wasn't around to shed any light on any of these allega- tions. His office said that he was out of town and unavailable. "And frankly," a spokeswoman said, "on something like this, I wouldn't have the faintest idea who to refer you to." Why all of this is relevant today is testimony more to the glacial pace of medical-journal communication than to anything else. But criticism of E.T.'s medical care has been quietly and slowly - if facetiously - building. It began in August, 1982, at a medical symposium on rare poisoning cases, continued in the correspondence columns of the medicine journal a year later and came to a head in the current issue. The debate pits Lampone against a prominent local emergency physician, Dr. Jonathan Wasserberger of the Charles R. Drew Medical School, Dr. Richard Weisman, director of the New York City Poison Control Center and a prominent expert in the field of toxicology, and Dr. Gary Ordog, a colleage of Wasserberger's at Martin Luther King General Hospital. E.T.'s physicians, say Wasserberger, Weisman and Ordog, made so many mistakes when they tried to resuscitate the poor creature that they almost killed him in the process. For one thing, the E.T. medical team failed to ask little Elliot, his young human friend, just what the stricken creature had been eating in the days before the attack. If the doctors had asked, Elliot probably would have told them that E.T. had liberally consumed Coors beer and corn chips, a diet that almost certainly resulted in a potentially catastrophic glucose deficiency. Because the doctors didn't ask, they never began emergency intravenous therapy to correct the dangerous interruption in his blood-sugar levels - whatever they normally should have been. Worse still, E.T.'s doctors completely overlooked the fact that his pupils were constricted and his skin - if that's what you call it - was turning bluish in the unmistakable first signs of cyanosis,, a sure indication he wasn't getting enough oxygen. Together, those symptoms should have warned E.T.'s physicians the poor creature was a victim of a narcotic overdose. That doesn't mean E.T. was a junkie, the dissident doctors quickly added. E.T.'s bizarre physiognomy probably resulted in his manufac- turing massive amounts of opiate-like natural chemicals. Humans do essentially the same thing on a much smaller scale, in the manufacture of natural pain-relieving chemicals called endorphins. But E.T. probably produced such large quantities of natural narco- tics that, when his body tried to compensate for the psychological trauma of being abandoned on Earth, he essentially overdosed himself. His doctors missed that, though, and lost an opportunity to pump him full of a substance called a narcotic antagonist to ward off the potentially fatal effects of his do-it-yourself drugs, the doctors charge. E.T.'s doctor joined the fray in the current issue, writing, "I am pleased that our efforts did not go unnoticed by those with knowledge to judge and evaluate the scene." Then, having dismissed virtually all of the deficiencies in E.T.'s care by using the "Spielberg-cut-it-in-editing" scenario, Lampone seems to conclude that it doesn't matter since the patient survived anyway. Specifically, Lampone asserted that he and his colleagues did give E.T. several doses of Nalaxone, a common narcotic antagonist. And he said that, contrary to the allegations against him, little Elliot, the boy's family and friends were all quizzed on E.T.'s eating habits. "You just have to assume that sometime during that period (the scene when E.T.'s medical crisis occurs) we would have taken a thorough history," Lampone said. "His heart arrested, and we were going to give him electrical shocks, but if you shock someone with a crystalline skin, how do you know you won't just crack them open?" Besides, Lampone said, "you can rest assured that E.T. received the very best care. God was on our side, and E.T. lives. He'll be back. "Spielberg wouldn't settle for second best for his alien. Spielberg is that kinda guy." It was at the 1982 International Symposium on Toxicology in Aspen, Colorado, that Weisman and Dr. Lewis Goldfrank, one of Weisman's colleagues at Bellevue Hospital, concluded that E.T.'s bizarre "skin" color and tight restriction of his pupils fingered him as a likely overdose victim. E.T. needed a narcotic antagonist, Weisman and Goldfrank contended. In fact, Weisman said, in recent research, the two New York doctors have even come up with a dosage level - two milligrams - in case any emergen- cy room in the country finds itself with an extraterrestrial as a patient. Months later, Wasserberger, a board-certified poison specialist and assistant professor at Drew Medical School, expanded on the original accusation. "Considering the way the case appeared to have been handled, I would say E.T. is lucky to be alive," Wasserberger told Calendar. "We have to realize that, in many ways, E.T. was like a child. His only nourishment appeared to have been Coors and corn chips, and alcohol in a child is known to cause profound hypoglycemia (a shortage of sugar in the blood). "The doctors should have at least found out what he'd been eating for the last couple of days. He looked like any wino they wheel into the emergency room on Saturday night." Then, Wasserberger said, there is the matter of the overdose. "You could tell his brain was producing inordinate amounts of narcotics," he said. "He was overly happy about his situation. He was a little blue, and his pupils were small." Wasserberger said that "if we had to take it at face value from what they showed us on the screen, there was obvious malpractice." Unlike some internecine disputes in medicine, however, this one appears unlikely to spill over into the courts, the public meetings of some medical society or the back-room backbiting of the bars and other places where doctors gather after work. The diplomatic Wasserberger read Lampone's explanation in the latest issue of the journal and pronounced himself mollified - if not entirely satisfied - with the cutting-room-floor claim. "He's a prominent physician at a major hospital here in town," Wasserberger said of Lampone, "and I will take him at his word."