It’s Christine Gregoire!

(Kidding, commenters.) Howard Kurtz reports that it may be the telegenic Dr. Sanjay Gupta, seen here discussing strokes:

Eli Sanders was The Stranger's associate editor. His book, "While the City Slept," was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He once did this and once won...

16 replies on “The New Surgeon General?”

  1. Maybe he can get together with (Senator) Al Frankin doing “Stewart Smalley” and talk about how America can be a more nuturing country.

  2. If this doesn’t prove that the “surgeon general” is pure PR and no substance, I don’t know what could. Does the “surgeon general” run an organization that extends beyond his secretary?

  3. I remember watching him debate Michael Moore after “Sicko” came out, and was profoundly depressed by both of them. Moore for being unprepared for simple, easy-to-rebut questions, Gupta for taking an obtuse line of attack at the movie that ignored its substantive points.

    Disspiriting stuff, but I dunno anything else about him.

  4. @2, the surgeon general’s office used to be pretty active until (Obama’s CIA nominee) Leon Panetta cut Joycelyn Elders’ balls off for Bill Clinton.

  5. @2, Dr. Gupta is a noted physician, and if he has name recognition, so what? That is a good thing. The main role of the Surgeon General is to promote the health of the populace at large. Indeed, he is famous, but by good work alone. And if someone is famous (“Hey, didn’t I see this guy in Time magazine?”) and dedicated like Koop, then who cares? I have no idea who the Current Occupants SG is, and I think he prefers it that way. Since, you know, medicine is a science and Shrub prefers his policies to be none-too science based.

  9. @5: Gupta not is a “noted physician” for developing a groundbreaking treatment, or running a large medical organization, but for being on teevee. I’m sure that he is, like tens of thousands of others, a competent physician, but what he is “noted” for, as you can read in his Wikipedia entry, is winning an emmy, being a frequest guest on “Anderson Cooper 360”, and being “named one of the Sexiest Men of 2003 by People magazine”.

  10. This is not good. Granted that I am not a big fan of Moore and he stretches the facts, anyone who would go to the trouble of debating Sicko does not have progressive ideas about the public’s health. I don’t know much about Gupta but I don’t think he spells “change” by any means.

    What we need for this position is a public health activist, not a, well, neurosurgeon/journalist. Public health is not the same as medicine.

  11. The position is to promote health education, NOT to fix the medical system. That’s not something the Surgeon General has the power to do. I think he’d be a perfectly fine pick, so would Dr. Drew.

  13. @11, yeah, and what does he know about health education?

    People actually study and devote whole careers to that field, and it isn’t just about talking about strokes on TV.

  15. From the WaPo article:

    His role as journalist and physician have sometimes overlapped. During the 2003 Iraq invasion, Gupta was embedded with a Navy unit called Devil Docs and, while covering its mission, performed brain surgery five times, the first of which was on a 2-year-old Iraqi boy.

    Whatever you gotta say, jumping in and performing brain surgery cuz you’re there and can is pretty inspiring.

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