Medical Shows on TV

I'm an academic, but I don't really take offense at portrayals of academia and academics in popular culture.

I mean, *nothing* in drama is presented as a one-to-one correspondence with reality. That's not the point. We all live in reality and want something other than reality to escape to.

R1 But academia is very different from medicine/ healthcare where there are life/ death/ moral decisions made often under time constraints. So of course those of us who have worked/ are working in the field have more of an opinion on whether or not it's reality-based. Of course there's leeway given for fictional storytelling, but when the technical elements contributing to the plot are laughably untrue or unrealistic then the rest of the story is kind of ruined after that.

I liked Chicago Hope too.

But my point, r2, is that the technical elements contributing to any fictional story defy our actual experience with reality.

I mean, the novels of Thomas Hardy are chock-full of unbelievable coincidence.

I know plenty of lawyers who enjoy Shakespeare; they don't watch the courtroom scene in The Merchant of Venice expecting a realistic portrayal of early modern Venetian law. No one -- now or then -- would have wanted to watch that.

When Kronk amputated that guy's limb with a chainsaw, that was realistic?

Yes, I find them, for the most part, totally unbelievable. The medical staff behave in insanely unethical, illegal ways and there are NO repercussions. And of course there's all the soap opera love affairs going on between everybody who works at the hospital. "Grey's Anatomy" is particularly ghastly; almost all the staff on that show behave as though they're extremely immature and/or batshit crazy.

Cutting LVAD wires and having sex with ghosts sounds pretty realistic to me

I hate shows where someone falls to the ground and a bystander or even a doctor cursorily feels for a pulse and sadly pronounces them dead. What? No CPR? No ambulance?

There was never a better doctor than ....Marcus Welby, M.D.!

There was never a better doctor than ....Marcus Welby, M.D.!

One of the elements that I find absolutely unbelievable is the ethnic/ racial makeup of physicians and nurses. I've always worked at major, teaching institutions (going on 16 years now) first as inpatient RN on different specialty units then past few years as DNP. So I have experience of working side by side with both nurses and physicians. TV portrayal of nurses is unreal because realistically there should be way more Filipino nurses. As for physicians all we mostly see on tv are White, Black, and some Latino MDs. In reality there are a lot more East Asian and Jewish MDs than are represented on tv, so there's that component of unbelievability too.

Yes R11 and nurses play a far bigger role in patient care than is shown on most medical shows. I never saw Nurse Betty. Was it any better?.

R11 No I never saw Nurse Betty, is that the one with Renee Zellweger?

I watched all the Chicago shows....Med, Fire, and PD .... one night. PD is pretty exciting and mostly stays away from relationship stuff. Fire has some stupid relationship storylines mixed in with emergencies. Med was laughable -- lots of tense music as background for dull scenes. Plus they describe every small thing in boring detail.

The only medical show that I enjoyed watching was House, but that's because Hugh Laurie was great in it, and. the mystery diagnoses storylines lent the series an element of unreality to begin with, so I didn't mind it as much.

I find the good doctor laughable.

I hated House after they hired those new actors.

Of the Chicago Three, I like Med, PD, and Fire in that order. Med because it has Will Halstead, PD because of the storytelling (and Patrick Flueger), and Fire because it's in the middle. I might not watch it otherwise. Sometimes I wish Jesse Spencer would move to one of the other shows.

I liked Chicago Hope until they hired Christine Lahti.

None was ever as good as St. Elsewhere.

Would we have seen Doogie Howser’s ass if it had been on HBO?

On "ER" the rogue doctor Doug Ross stole medical equipment and euthanized a child. He was not arrested or charged with anything; due to a friend pulling a few strings he simply left town to be a doctor somewhere else. On that same show the character Abby, who is supposed to be so admirable and irresistible to men (she's played by the plain as a boiled potato Maura Tierney), requests and gets some expensive anti-AIDS medication by lying and saying she'd gotten an accidental needle stick. She gave the medication to a patient who thought she might have been exposed to AIDS. In both instances these characters behave immorally and Illegally and yet nothing happened to them. It really is disgusting to see how doctors and other medical staff are portrayed on these shows.

I've been a doctor for over thirty years. I find it hard to watch medical stuff because they get all the little details wrong. Slight mispronunciation of terms, instruments held the wrong way etc. Takes me right out of the scene. I don't mind some of the soap opera elements but there's no more screwing around among colleagues in medicine than in any other field of endeavor. Think of the people you work with and what might happen if you started boinking them on the job... They also seem to have no idea how medical training actually works. Med students are always doing things they would never be allowed to do in real life and residents seem to switch their specialties at random for the needs of the plot.

r19, I worked at hospitals where euthanasia was the norm (morphine overdose) and no one batted an eye. Illegal and often unethical activities are not unusual.

They have consultants, but that doesn't mean they listen to them.

I thought that Scrubs was fairly accurate, goofed up a lot.

The child that Doug Ross euthanized was not in the hospital (that's why he stole the hospital equipment; Carol Hathaway was in cahoots with him). He was in a house under the care of his mother. The child's condition (he was in pain due to his illness; I can't remember what it was) made the mother despair and she told Doug she didn't know how much longer she could stand it. So he "helps" her and the child by killing him. The child's father later appears on the scene and is understandably enraged at his son being killed by the rogue doctor. But Doug just takes off for another city. I thought that was unbelievable. Surely the father would have sued the hospital and Doug Ross and there would have been serious consequences. But it being a t v show, nobody really gets in trouble. TV medical shows have so little to do with reality.

There must be some encyclopedia of rare diseases that they use for these shows because I’ve never seen or heard of many of them after a long career in medicine. GA is especially bad about this. Also research is not just casually done without extensive permission processes.

R21 Don't leave it that vague. We need to know something about where those hospitals are so we can avoid them.

R26 I'm not R21 but I can tell you that it's not teaching hospitals affiliated with university medical/ nursing schools. There's no way you can get away with doing that shady shit at those institutions, it's why I will only work for them as I have so far in my career.

I've known a few doctors who say that "Scrubs" came the closest to what it's really like working in a hospital.

Just without the voiceovers.

I think what R21 refers to happens more often in hospice settings and it's not as sinister as it sounds, more like a slight hastening of the inevitable once it gets really bad.

r28, interesting that a comedy is closest to the truth. Similarly, I remember reading that police officers thought the most believable program about cops was Barney Miller.

R30 And military people said the same about MASH

Legal shows always have cases resolved within days. Guess what? That’s not how it works.

LOL R10. No way. My show was much more realistic.

Well, Dr. Kildare was unrealistic too, but fun to watch.