AMA Hopes New Ads Will Cure Image Problem : The campaign will portray doctors in a sensitive light. Critics say the plan ignores the profession’s real shortcomings.

If you, like many Americans, think doctors are a bunch of inattentive money-grubbers, then the American Medical Assn. has a message for you.

Starting this week, the Chicago-based physicians’ group is launching its first major media campaign to spruce up what it admits is a tarnished image for a profession the public once revered as a selfless collection of Dr. Kildares and Welbys. But a leading medical industry critic called the scheme “condescending.”

From now through spring, the AMA plans to spend $1.75 million on a series of ads in major news magazines. The ads will highlight the caring, sharing, sensitive side of the AMA’s members. The kickoff ad profiles a doctor in poverty-stricken East St. Louis, Ill., who treats babies addicted to cocaine at birth.

“There’s a common perception amongst physicians that the public does not fully understand or appreciate the work that they do,” said Larry Joyce, chief spokesman for the 250,000-member group, which represents slightly less than half of U.S. doctors. “That’s what this campaign is designed to address, but we’re not naive enough to think that this, in and of itself, is going to solve the problem.”

That problem, as the AMA sees it, is this: In a recent survey conducted for the group by the Gallup Organization, 69% of the 1,500 people questioned agreed when asked if they thought “people are beginning to lose faith in their doctors.” At the same time, 63% said doctors are “too interested in making money” while only 31% said doctors “spend enough time with their patients.”

While dumping on doctors in general, the respondents had a far better reaction when asked the same questions about their personal physicians. Only 10% said they were losing faith in their own doctor while 18% said their doctor was too interested in money and 78% said their doctor spent ample time with them.

The disparity in responses led the AMA to conclude that the profession was suffering primarily from a perception problem. “The whole purpose of this is to personalize physicians so that people will see that physicians across the country are much like their own individual doctors,” Joyce said. Another phase of the campaign will be to get doctors more involved in community affairs and encourage them to cultivate their local media, he said.

Rather than applaud the AMA, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the Public Citizen Health Research Group, said he found such efforts appalling. “It’s a condescending view they portray of the American public,” complained Wolfe, whose Washington-based group is affiliated with the Ralph Nader family of consumer organizations.

Wolfe said the survey results reflect an increasing public sophistication about the shortcomings of medical care as reports abound of unnecessary surgeries, over-prescribing of drugs, heavy physician investment in the same laboratories to which they refer patients and other problems.

“The response should be to do something about the reality that is causing people to have this (negative) view rather than treating the public like an idiot and trying to solve the fundamental problem with an image campaign,” Wolfe said. “ . . . There’s a real problem in the house of medicine, and AMA wants to solve it by just taking out ads saying ‘everything’s OK, let’s go back to the good old days when ignorance is bliss.’ ”