Shows like House, Offspring, ER, M*A*S*H, Scrubs, All Saints and Grey’s Anatomy were TV breeding grounds for romance, drama, comedy, war and misadventure in medicine.
While we love watching doctors and nurses save lives we know they aren’t really practicing medicine, don’t we? If you answered yes, what’s coming next may, ahem, shock you. A TV medical show got it right and potentially saved someone’s life. Really.
Doctors in Germany recently claimed to correctly diagnose a patient based on some obscure medical details he saw in an episode of House.
Real life doctors were able to save a 55-year-old German man’s life after the medical team were reminded of an episode of the hit TV show starring Hugh Laurie, while trying to treat the patient who had a baffling medical condition.
Get real
In the real world it’s more common for the world of media dramas on TV to more closely resemble the wild west than the Harvard Medical School, with doctors wielding defibrillators like six-guns, blazing away at every dead or dying patient in sight.
Offspring, starring Asher Keddie, is remembered more for drama than scientific reality. Photo: Network Ten
Hospital romances are similarly overblown, with drop-dead gorgeous medical professionals christening every day bed, operating table and broom closet with their countless trysts.
As you would expect, the reality of a doctor’s life is far different, and a lot drabber, than the telly would have us believe.
So, aside from the odd episode of House, is the tube warping our view of this trusted profession, and feeding us medical lies?
Telling fibs about defibrillators
The most “unstoppable” of TV fallacies is that defibrillators can revive patients whose heart has flatlined, according to rehabilitation physician and pain specialist at Barwon Health Dr Michael Vagg.
“The number one thing they get wrong, which I actually wrote an article about, is that it’s an utter myth to use the defibrillator on someone who’s flat lining. That’s actually the one cardiac arrest where you never use defibrillation,” says Dr Vagg.
Bill Hughes, who produced the popular medical drama All Saints, and directed several episodes of A Country Practice and The Flying Doctors, was unaware of the truth about defibrillators until he spoke with The New Daily.
“That’s interesting. I didn’t know that,” said Hughes when told that defibrillators are actually used to stop the heart, in the hope that it will kick-start back into a regular rhythm.
Surgery
The operating theatre, where most shows devote a gory amount of time, is another hotbed of inaccuracy.
“They have to have those interesting conversations over the patient while they’re on the table. That gets consistently unrealisticly portrayed, to the point where that does sometimes make me have to leave the room. I just can’t put up with looking at it,” says Dr Vagg.
“A lot of the portrayal of what goes on in an operating theatre is over the top, because they are generally very calm, efficient sorts of places.”
Yep it’s inaccurate, but don’t take it to heart
Hughes says we should take it for granted that what we see on TV is untrustworthy because the focus is the narrative, not medicine.
ER’s Doug Ross and Carol Hathaway, played by George Clooney and Julianna Margulies, had the hottest romance on TV in the 1990s. Photo: NBC
“We weren’t really doing a show (All Saints) about how to do an operation or a defibrillation. We were doing a show about characters and how they were affected by their medical state,” he says.
Despite glaring medical errors in many shows, Dr Vagg lets producers like Hughes off the hook.
“I think we should enjoy them, without taking any of the medical details too seriously.” he says.
Romance on the Ward
Of course, medical accuracy is paramount. But what we really want to know is how often the Drs McDreamy are getting steamy.
It’s very unlikely that the staff are going at it on the job, given concerns about hygiene and getting fired. But Dr Vagg confirms that hospital wards can be hot spots for attraction and blossoming romance.
“Well, [hospital romances] certainly happen. There’s no two ways about that. I think back to about 15 years ago when I was a junior doctor in Geelong. There was a number of the junior doctors who got together and are still together,” he says.
“It’s not just the doctors with each other. It’s doctors with physios, OTs, and nurses.
“When you have people who are young, single and reasonably well paid and you put them in a pressure cooker environment all together, you’ll get some romances for sure.”
Do these medical TV show make the cut?
Offspring
Medical accuracy: ✪
Realistic portrayal of nurses: ✪✪✪
Offspring centres around the life and times of 30-something obstetrician Nina Proudman. Given that the focus is more on Nina’s life than her workplace, it wouldn’t pay to look to closely at the medical details. But in a genre where nurses often play second-fiddle to doctors, it is a much better depiction of our invaluable Florence Nightingales. “The nurses are portrayed as people who work hard and are the centres of gossip,” according to Dr Vagg, who says this depiction is “not a million miles from the truth”.
House
Medical accuracy: ✪✪✪
Realism: zero stars
Our favourite Sherlockian doctor, who serves up elementary deductions and drug-fuelled rants in equal measures, regularly hit the medical mark in this series, despite his misbehaviour bearing no resemblance to reality. “House, I think, is probably actually the most unrealistic of all the TV shows,” says Dr Vagg.
Grey’s Anatomy
Medical accuracy: ✪
Realism: ✪
Grey’s Anatomy is the flagship of soppy medical drama. What it lacks in medical accuracy it makes up for with hefty serves of relationship conflict and heartstring pulling. According to Dr Vagg, the show gets the medical details and hospital environment “wrong most of the time”. “They get something right, and you’ll go, oh that was neat,” he says. “It’s always a pleasant surprise.”
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