Best medical journalist in Australia: Dr Norman Swan .......... guest post

As a boy, Norman Swirsky was raised in relative poverty (dad was a musician) in a Jewish fam­ily living in Glasgow. When he was 10 years old, his dad ch­anged the family's surname to Swan in a response to ongoing anti-Semitism in Scot­land after WW2. Young Norman Swan wanted to be an actor grow­ing up, but his parents encouraged him to study medicine. He grad­uated in medicine from the Uni­versity of Aberdeen and later ob­tained his postgraduate qualifications in Paediatrics. After that, he spent time working in London before moving to Australia.

Dr Norman Swan in Sydney

 

While on a break from medicine in 1982 he joined the ABC and began a stellar career as one of the first medically qualified journalists in Aust­ral­ia. His career was highlighted by his desire to keep the Aust­ral­ian public inform­ed of health developments as they happen, combining medical expertise with journalism.

Since then Dr Swan has won numerous awards for his work as presenter of the Health Report on ABC Radio National and created the Health Minutes on NewsRadio. Note that the Health Report has been the world’s longest running health programme in the English-speaking world. He also edited his own news­let­ter, The Choice Health Reader, published with the Aust­ral­ian Consumers Association. Most of all, he earned my respect as an articulate, community-minded doctor.

Swan was a multi-award winning producer, broadcaster & in­vest­igative journalist. He was Australian Radio Producer of the Year in 1984 and was awarded a Gold Citation in the United National Media Peace Prizes for his radio work. He has won 3 Walkley National Awards for Australian journalism including the Gold, and twice won Aus­tralia's top prize for Science Journalism, the Michael Daly Award.

A famous example of Dr Swan's work was his much publicised and contro­versial investigative programme on scientific fraud and the well-known gynaecologist Dr William McBride. In 1987, based on evidence from a Found­ation 41 biologist in an analysis for ABC’s Science Show, Dr Swan bravely stated that Dr McBride had failed to scientifically record the amount of drug the experimental animals received. Swan won a Walk­ley award for his re­s­earch, while McBride’s career moved in the other direction. In 2004 he was awarded the Medal of the Australian Academy of Science, a rare hon­our, and the Royal College of Physicians of Glasgow made him a Fellow. 

Norman Swan's core missions were indeed brave. Firstly he wanted to give people the information and insights they needed to make the best decisions about their health, usually information that only doctors had. And secondly, as a health journalist and in the tradition of the Fourth Estate, his role was to hold those who provide and fund health­care to account.

On television, Dr Swan has hosted ABC television's science program, Quantum, and has been a guest reporter on Catalyst and Four Corners. He hosted Health Dimensions on ABC Television, and created, wrote and nar­rated a four part series on disease and civilisation, Invisible Enem­ies, made for Channel 4(UK) and SBS Television. This was shown in 27 countries! He also co-wrote and narrated The Opposite Sex, a four part series for ABC Television.

Dr Swan addressing a conference

NSW Health Symposium, 2014

Outside Australia, Dr Swan has been the Aus­tralian cor­respondent for the Journal of the American Medical Assoc­iat­ion, the Brit­ish Medical Journal and has consulted for the World Health Organ­isation in Geneva. [NB he was brutally criticised by American conservatives. Rush Limbaugh emphasised that Covid-19 was being "weap­onised" by Swan in the Australian media to bring down Donald Trump].

The advent of Covid-19 has changed everyone’s lives and it also thrust Norman Swan into the key role in his career: he became Australia's most well-known doctor and a trusted voice in the long pandemic. He co-created a hit with his daily 10-minute podcast with health reporter Tegan Taylor called Corona­cast. They provided the latest evidence on the pandemic by responding to questions from the audience, and last year it won a Walk­ley Award. In 2021 he published a book about general health to guide people beyond the pandemic: So You Think You Know What's Good For You?.

Dr Swan has been involved a range of topics on health based on his many years in medical research. But his greatest ability was as a very skil­l­ed facilitator who tackled the most specialised of conferences, chall­eng­ing ideas to raise the level of debate. Now download the podcast The life of Dr Norman Swan 

by Dr Joe