Movie ‘Stuck on You’ crosses medical line

MICHAEL ARNOLD GLUECK

One of the great slow progresses of our civilization is learning to

treat people with disabilities as human beings, not objects of

ridicule. Often, Hollywood has been in the forefront. Movies such as

“A Beautiful Mind,” “Scent of a Woman,” “Children of a Lesser God,”

“Rain Man” and “Forrest Gump” have enriched our understanding of

those with mental illness, the visually impaired, the hearing

impaired, autism and retardation.

We should expect no less in the presentation and dramatization of

those who are born as conjoined twins. But now Tinsel Town is doing

something both tasteless and unconscionable. Here, I am talking about

how Hollywood and Madison Avenue, in their lust for laughs and

larceny, offend our medical senses with movies like “Stuck on You.”

The movie is filled with sight gags and puns, as male twins joined

at the waist go about their daily tasks. One venerable paper

describes the movie as “hilarious;” other reviewers as “two thumbs up

times two.” What are they thinking?

“This is just not funny stuff,” said Lynn Bloomberg, a veteran

registered nurse and counselor from a medical family in Newport

Beach. “Now when I watch movies, ‘Saturday Night Live’ or [‘The

Tonight Show with Jay] Leno’ there is rarely anything that is

fall-over-laughing funny. The jokes are cruel. This generation laughs

at things their parents would never consider funny.”

Has Hollywood noted that this movie just might be offensive to the

48 million Americans who are disabled in some way and their friends

and families?

This is not a humorous issue. Conjoined twins have intrigued

society for centuries and are among the rarest of human beings and

have been treated as both gods and monsters over the history

timeline.

According to a report on the BBC’s Web site, only a few hundred

pairs of conjoined twins are born in the world each year. They appear

about once in every 100,000 births but more than half of them are

stillborn, and one third live for only a few days. There are probably

fewer than a dozen adult pairs living in the world today.

Of those who survive, a very small number will be medically

eligible for separation surgery. But as there are few countries who

have the hospitals, physicians, nurses and technicians with the

skills and experience to perform this delicate surgery, separation is

a very unusual event.

Before surgery, endless diagnostic and imaging procedures,

including sophisticated magnetic resonance imaging test -- more

commonly referred to as MRIs -- must be performed. Dozens of

specialists and sub-specialists are consulted and intricate plans

prepared for surgery. There are dress rehearsals -- lasting hours --

with scores of personnel involved. The cost of separation surgery is

in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, even though most physicians

donate their time.

The agonizing decisions that surgeons and other specialists have

to make when faced with conjoined twins have been highlighted by

recent cases. Separating these twins is not only technically

challenging; it usually involves life and death decisions about

whether one twin should be sacrificed in the hope of saving the

other. In one recent headlined case the twins shared the same venous

drainage from separate brains.

The misfortune for conjoined twins who live together is that they

inevitably die together, too. When one twin dies, the heart of the

other twin keeps pumping until he or she is drained of blood.

The venerable Massachusetts General Hospital -- a Harvard teaching

hospital, the largest hospital in New England and the nation’s third

oldest -- is on 55 Fruit St. in Boston. The residents work hard and

long and the competition is fierce. Yes, there are humorous moments

in all this seriousness but in the 1960’s and 1970’s no one

considered crossing the line. You didn’t make fun of disabilities any

more than you would cancer.

Have we become so insensitive, anesthetized and lost our sense and

sensibilities that we can no longer differentiate between crass humor

and compassionate portrayals of the disabled and congenitally

deformed? Others may ridicule for fun and profit but I hope you do

not.

As for this writer, on this issue, I choose not to cross the

medical line or push the envelope of Fruit Street and the halls of

Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Perhaps in sum, conjoined twins are nature’s special way (and

challenge) of teaching us how to get along and make the most of what

we have. For those who are conjoined, and remain so, must always

think of the needs of the other person.

* MICHAEL ARNOLD GLUECK is a Newport Beach doctor and a senior

fellow in medical affairs at the Aretea Institute in Seattle, Wash.