Thank you for finally saying what I have thought for years. I stopped watching "doctor" shows a long time ago. It is not just that they are so short of reality. They insult the nursing profession.

I stopped watching ER with the first episode when the first patient through the doors was a nurse who had taken an overdose. This was the best way they could think of to introduce this nurse as a permanent cast member???????????????

Long ago, when I was in nursing school, we all went down to the TV room to watch Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare. Even back then, we noticed how the same nurse seemed to be working 24/7. As long as one showed up, it didn't seem to matter who it was.

If the only reason people were in hospitals is because they needed 24 hour physician care, hospitals would be empty. Some do need extensive, time consuming medical intervention. The only thing that ALL patients need is 24 hour NURSING CARE.

Thanks again.

For whatever it is worth, the opposite of "ordinary" is not "beautiful," it is "extraordinary." This matters in this sense: beauty and ordinariness are only different superficially. Extraordinary implies something more profound and beneath the surface.

TV hospitals provide a beautiful but superficial service -- the diagnosis and treatment of rare disease. Brillant problem solving may be intellectually impressive (beautiful), but it is superficial because it is not the brunt of real-world medical work. It is not what healing people is all about. Real hospitals provide the more extraordinary service, that is, treatment of common diseases and common people. A garden variety heart attack is too mundane for an episode of "House," but precisely because it is ordinary, it requires extraordinary care by medical people who realize that a common disease is not common at all to the person who suffers from it.

As a doctor, I can tell you that it is the nursing staff and not the doctors that make a hospital extraordinary. An average doctor (I consider my abilities average) can become an excellent one if the nursing is excellent. Nurses are my eyes and ears when I am gone; if they hear well and see much then I know everything. If they are blind and deaf I know nothing.

A doctor and the nursing staff is like a conductor and an orchestra. A brilliant orchestra can make even the sorriest conductor look like a genius. But no matter how good the conductor is, he or she cannot coax brilliance out of an orchestra that does not have the talent to provide it.

Before reading this article I had thought the show was totally real. I watch it so that I can learn what it's like to work in a hospital, in case I want to try that some day.

I guess I can still fall back on being a medical examiner, which looks extrememely adventurous and sexy.

Over the years, I've visited many hospitals throughout the country in connection with my work. Some of them are even more beautiful than the one depicted on "House." The really spectacular ones are major academic medical centers. Two examples are Northwestern Memorial in Chicago and Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis.

The reason there are so many resources available to the docs on "House" is because Princeton Plainsboro is this type of tertiary care/teaching/research hospital. House's Department of Diagnostics gets only the extremely difficult, exotic cases that the expert specialists who work in the other departments of the medical center can't figure out. Some plot elements do strain credulity, e.g. the doctors' invading patients' homes to investigate possible causes of illness. I also object to some of the (probably CSI-inspired) biological gross-out scenes. House's over-the-top behavior results in so many high-quality, unexpected laughs that I'm willing to forgive him and the writers for it.

I recently watched the first season of "St. Elsewhere" on DVD and wondered if it would still hold up after 25 years. It was great, one of the best medical series of all time.

The fact that some people may think a hospital is or should be like 'House' is unfortunate. However these are people that probably also think that:

- The DaVinci code was based on fact

- CSI accurately reflects actual forensic work

- The way Earth diverted disaster in the film Armageddon would be possible

I'm sure that everyone who is proud of their profession has a show or film or book that irks them because it doesn't represent their job correctly. I'm a computer programmer and it drives me up the wall when I see silly 'You've got mail' graphics in films. Everyone knows how their email appears in real life but the film-makers insist on making it look cooler.

That's the point. And I agree with all those who've already said it. Hollywood produces material to help us escape from daily life. Europeans tend to be a little grittier and cynical, but how often do you see their shows in the US whereas US shows are sold to most countries around the globe. People want to escape.

I do think it is valid and, probably for some, very important to be reminded that life on film does not reflect real life. But it is also important to remember that House or CSI or Dan Brown never claimed that they were trying to be accurate.

There is only one reason for watching "House, MD" (which we do whenever it's on -- it moves around a lot), and that's Hugh Laurie. The show is basically a showcase for him to do an over-the-top character with a lot of flamboyant characteristics, and Laurie is absolutely terrific in this role and loads of fun to watch each week.

Otherwise, it's a terrible show -- seriously, just awful. The writing is subpar, the other actors entirely forgettable and the medical aspects of the show -- even for TV -- are inane. In fact, we often find outselves laughing more at the ridiculous "illnesses of the week" (always the most bizarre things in the medical dictionary, they must be starting at "Z" and working their way backwards) and the even more ludricous "treatments" the staff (besides being suspiciously good looking, the four of them each apparently practice every single branch of medicine and every specialty for a entire city hospital!) comes up with -- often causing, even in the fantasy world of the show, incredible expense and suffering for their patients. I'd say they violate the Hypocratic oath about every 10 seconds.

One thing to keep in mind is that this, and all shows (even the handful of generally excellent ones) are writtten almost entirely by a group of TV writers who are almost entirely male, almost entirely white, extremely affluent, highly educated, very snobbish and who ALL live in a very rarified and isolated part of the US -- the pricey parts of Los Angeles and Hollywood -- and are amazingly out of touch with anything approaching normal American life in "flyover country". Even more troubling, they consider the audience they write for to be contempible idiots, way beneath the writers in income, intellect and taste.

Of course such writers think that hospitals are pretty places staffed by extremely good looking doctors, and that if admitted, you will receive kid-glove treatment...because, more or less, that is true for THEM. They can afford to go to that kind of private hospital in Southern California. The real world of people with inadequate insurance, understaffed hospitals and homely middle aged staffers is invisible to them. (Anyhow, they are also mostly young and not likely to be suffering from any chronic medical problems anyways.)

There is a problem with a culture that allows all their stories to be told by such a pompous, isolated and out-of-touch storytellers....in that we will only ever get this limited, myopic view of things (whether medical stories or law stories or whatever).

And I think it's foolish to think that audiences -- after decades of viewing extremely unrealistic shows -- are not being influenced in how they feel about real life interactions with medicine or the law. People's expectations ARE formed by what they see, especially when they see it over and over, the same untruths expressed in many shows on many channels, in endless reruns. Sure, its entertainment....but its poor quality entertainment that assumes the audience is composed of unthinking imbeciles and feeds them untruths. How much of our passive acceptance of poor quality healthcare and lack of health insurance for many of us is due to the silliness that we consume daily on the tube, which tells us that everything is rosy, everyone is pretty and everything turns out fine in the 59th minute?