Letters to the Editor
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Dr. Kelso = Bill Lumbergh
Medical workers love Scrubs the way cubicle-dwellers love Office Space, and for good reason. Both the TV show and the now-cult movie are farces and exaggerations, but not by much! That's what makes them so brilliant. In their comedic and often silly ways, the two are just spot-on in their depictions of the real world, maybe more so than any documentary would be.
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Your life is boring
You know, there is a reason that actors and writers create TV and not nurses. I would not want to watch your real job any more than someone would want to watch my real job editing photos. But when forensics shows do ridiculous photo "enhancements" in seconds, I don't lambaste the entire genre for being unrealistic. Of course it is, it's meant to entertain. Don't complain just because your life is boring. And SCRUBS!? That show sucks -- it's so senseless and unfunny. High school students could write better jokes. Hell, nurses could.
And can I add, there's also a reason that authors write articles and not nurses. They actually think through WHY things are the way they are. All you did was complain that a TV show wasn't realistic. Bravo. I'm pretty sure anyone could have told me that. Now can a real author and thinker tell me why we are drawn to fantasy and embellishment in others' jobs, or why some of us think our own jobs are so great that others should care about them, unembellished?
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Sallie, now you're just confused
first I thought you were upset,
from your last post, now, I realize you're just confused.
if you want to make a point about how underappreciated nurses are, then
kudos to you- you have a lot of experience to draw on and the more power to you for doing so noble a public service. The general public would not mind being reminded of this fact.
However,
you have decided that the reason you and some of your colleagues who have posted are underappreciated is that doctors are overappreciated.
so you take a 'straw man' argument - set up the fantasy medical show that we know over-inflates (if that isn't too redundant a word) the 'doctor' role to absurdity, and claim that this represents the real-life perception of a 'doctor' and conclude that
doctors are overappreciated which is of course the reason that nurses are underappreciated.
this is not a pissing match about who has it worse in the medical profession - who is more underappreciated or who is portrayed more erroneously in the media... you do the medical professionals like yours and doctors and respiratory therapists and physical therapists (and so on) no favors by being petulant.
Sallie, go ahead and make your point, ceratinly a valid one, but don't bash another profession to lift yours up.
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an incomplete diagnosis?
To add my $0.02 on the theme of various misapprehensions by the viewing public: if the unwashed masses are misguided enough to think that television dramas are a realistic portrayal of life in a hospital, is the real problem that the shows aren't realistic?
Isn't the real problem that a lot of people are dumb as a box of rocks?
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Hey "Totally Bummed" Ray!
So you were thinking of getting your medical education via watching doctor shows...were you really just being sarcastic, or were you doing an "in-joke" - aiming your letter at those of us who saw the movie "Catch Me If You Can?" One of the many jobs that the real-life con man played by Leonardo McDreamy had in the 1960s was that of head doctor in an urban hospital ward. How did he get his "credentials?" By watching medical dramas on TV and figuring out that since the head MD usually just asked his subordinates: "So, based on this diagnosis, what do YOU think you should do? OK, go ahead!" he should be able to acquit himself rather well, provided he could get pass the pre-employment interview. Which he did!
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oh come on
there's nothing wrong with this article. House is ridiculous, not just because of the obvious beautiful hospital or beautiful people, but the way he dissects every piece of info the patients give him. Doctors often listen to patients with half an ear, they don't pore over every detail of the conversation and if the patient dies, he dies. I don't fault doctors for that, it's just the way it is. And we know it's TV, thanks so for pointing that out. So this is entertainment? Yes, like a cartoon. And I am all for cartoon-like live action. Hugh Laurie should go back to Jeeves and Wooster. That was believable. More believable than taking a man who's been in a coma for years to Vegas and getting him to shoot himself so his son can live. There's dramatic license and then there's complete idiocy.
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If Cosmic Mojo's post is any indication, I stand corrected on how much of a misunderstanding there is about nurses and what we do.
actually I was just IN the hospital a few months ago, and being bored out of my gourd, observed closed what each person there did.
While important to my recovery, dispensing pills, taking my temperature, and sponge bathing me once were NOT exciting enough to make a TV show about. I could give you an hour by hour description of what each person (doctor, nurse, aide) did, but it was boring, outside of the accident, the surgery. The recovery is boring, no one would make a show about that.
THAT, was my point. NOT that nurses don't do good work. No one here contests that. What we contest is that the same thing makes for entertaining TV. Well, it doesn't. Just like my job would not make for entertaining TV. I don't take it personally and consider any different opinion a challenge to the validity of my career.
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ps
as I continue to recover from my accident, I DO deal with the doctor, not his nurse. He is the one who put me back together and he is the one who is tracking my progress to make sure i get full use back.
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Scrubs?
You're kidding me, right?
After deriding an obviously over-the-top character drama like "House" becasue it's unrealistic (An unrealistic TV show? I'm shocked!), the author then turns to Scrubs as a realistic hospital show?
You mean with the singing and dancing, pretty doctors who are amazingly funny instead of just amazingly brilliant? With the one wise-beyond-his-years narrator who is always able to wrap things up with a cute little weekly moral of the story?
Oh and let's not forget the episode where the writers turned the resident House-like Dr. Cox into a House-facsimile complete with cane for an episode just to point out how overly dramatic House often is. Seeing as how I watch one show for drama and one for comedy, i didn't really need the writers to point that difference out to me! And since I watch TV as an escape, I also didn't really need some random nurse's rant that TV shows misrepresent hospitals. I've been in one, and already knew that.
Now since Salon has allowed this inane rant as an article, i would like to take the opportunity to point out that "MythBusters" completely misrepresents what it's like to work as a modern scientist/engineer. Yeah, I couldn't think of any better show to rant about, probably because engineers just don't get alot of TV show time. Also, Dilbert totally gets engineers wrong, although not by much.