I Don’t Want to Die in a TV Hospital

  I once heard someone say that the two most reviled professions are Doctors and Lawyers (I'm pretty sure it was an episode of Studio 60, thank you Mr. Sorkin). I put very little stock in this statement being true since I know so many people who want to be either/or and know quite a few wonderful both. And even less stock when you turn on the TV and see the subject matter of most hit shows. Nearly all or many of the characters in prime time drama are a doctor, a lawyer or a cop. Or a rich heir/ess but I call those types of shows “Pretty people with problems” and don't really care about them. In this entry I want to focus on the doctors. Specifically how little faith I would want to put in the care these fictional medical practitioners are capable of giving.

Medical shows have been a major part of television since the sixties. First there was Quincy ME (more of a mortician than a doctor, but still a medical show). That later gave birth to the popular soap opera General Hospital. Then there was MASH and China Beach, both medicine in wartime shows. Doogie Howser was less about medicine and more about adolescence. Further down the road Chicago Hope and ER dueled against each other, many times causing the audience to be unable to differentiate which is which (Adam Arkin and George Clooney had the same hair and they were both set in Chicago). And in recent memory we have had Grey’s Anatomy and House. I’ll even throw Royal Pains in there since the main character is a doctor. Basically all these shows feature large amounts of medicine and drama. Now while the doctors in these shows are all skilled, and in many cases at the top of their game, the drama in which they inhabit seems to completely neutralize their skills as medical practitioners.

There is a personal reason for my fascination with the portrayals of doctors. As a child I was rather sickly. That is, I seemed to always come down with the worst illness a child could come down with doing normal childlike activities (but I also ate a cockroach once so maybe I was not the most sanitary child and deserved every disease I got). It was never just a simple case of the sniffles, which every mother has had to deal with in the process of raising a child. To put it simple I was horribly sick most of the time. And I can say I received excellent care from my doctor. A doctor who in no way resembled the emotionally crippled doctors of most medical dramas. I didn’t have to hear about relationships or personal problems. The hospital was not placed under quarantine due to a rare disease outbreak, bomb scare, psychotic gunman, or any of the other insane storylines that have occurred in any given season of a particular show. I actually got treated like a patient and had an uneventful recovery.

I’ll admit it might be unfair to include shows like MASH and China Beach on this list. Both those shows took place in a wartime setting so of course there is going to be an added level of unexpected drama. They are operating in a battle setting and thus have a different view of things. But for the most part the rest of these shows take place in a normal hospital setting. There are no bombs going off, no wave of casualties coming in, no advancing army marching forward, things are for the most part supposed to be a relatively controlled environment.

Highlighting how much I would not want to be treated in a TV hospital let us take a look at County General Hospital, the fictional setting of the TV show ER. ER was written by famed writer Michael Crichton and based a lot around his experiences as a young physician starting out in medicine. That would seem to indicate that ER is based mostly on reality. Then again, Michael Crichton is also famously the author of Jurassic Park, about a theme park where Dinosaurs run wild, so maybe reality is not completely to be expected. I’m sure the technical information in this show is spot on, but at the same time I find it hard to believe the multiple scenarios that occur per episode. The employees of County General have faced gang warfare, smallpox outbreaks, fires, explosions, a helicopter crash, a serial killer stalking the hospital, a cancer diagnosis, an AIDS diagnosis; I could go on and on. I find the idea of just doing the most menial of tasks in that environment, let alone practice complex medicine, to be absolutely daunting.

Of course ER seems like a better choice for care than Seattle Grace Hospital. In the fictional setting of the show Grey’s Anatomy, not only do they have all the drama and chaos that plagued County General, the doctors in Grey’s Anatomy never seem to stop having sex long enough to actually practice medicine. Now I’m not trying to be some kind of prude, but I don’t want my life in the hands of someone who is only have paying attention to their work because they did or didn’t get a little afternoon delight. Or worse, they are having a severe argument with the person who is assisting them with the operation and literally take out their emotions on my unconscious corpse.

Yet those two situations seem like a spa vacation compared to being treated at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. For those who don’t know, that is the hospital that employs the brilliant yet surly Dr. Gregory House, main character in the aptly named House. This show has all the drama and sexual tension of the above medical dramas and the added danger of being treated like an experiment instead of as an actual patient. Nearly every episode involves the treatment of some rare, extremely hard to diagnose disease, that is always treated incorrectly at first causing the patient to get much sicker than when they arrived at the hospital. A few sniffles and a cough turns into a case of having one's skin melting off. This show has probably given hypochondriacs inspiration for a never ending slew of obscure diseases.

The ONLY Doctor I trust.

I don’t consider myself to be a hypochondriac but as soon as I start to sniffle a bit I immediately start chugging orange juice and vitamins like its nobody’s business. And with good reason. If you’ve read most of these blog entries it seems pretty obvious that I can’t always tell where the line is that separates fiction from reality. If these fictional hospitals are any indication of what it is like in their real world counterparts then I shall endeavor to never get sick enough to need hospitalization. EVER.