Letters to the Editor
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Doy
In response to another reviewers' post of this being an obvious observation: e.g doy it's tv, not real life, you might want to reconsider your position. I recently entered a EMT Basic Course to be certified as yes an EMT. As I've attended this class my perceptions of both medicine, justice and crime analysis have been greatly altered. I'm a member of the average public, meaning I don't often find myself at crime scenes or hospitals or court rooms. Over the course of this class my views, the majority of which were shaped by watching tv: House, E.R. (since I was 9), Scrubs, Law and Order, the many CSIs, or any other show portraying 'real' life. This was of course stupid, but it's how the majority of the people in this country form opinions/feel informed. For example since the premiere of the original CSI juries have demanded more extensive forensic testing for even the simplest cases, going as far as not to convict confessed killers merely because of the absence of this inane tests. Another example of this is something my teacher informed my class of tonight: the gun shot residue test performed every 5 minutes on television is very rare, very expensive and only performed by the FBI. Yet on tv they spray a blue mist and all is revealed.
Our view of the world is what is revealed and many of us, trapped within mundane lives that find science mysterious and left to others, marvel at the mystery of those unknown, complicated places where we go to die or seem to miraculously get well, get prosecuted and sentenced, taken to a jail cell to spend the remainder of lives, or the science that points to our killers. Until you are presented the facts or find yourself in one of these situations it's easy to feel awe.
Yet these places: the hospital, the court, the morgue are not places most of wish to spend time. They are places of weakness made heroic by production values and pretty actors. As a society we merely wish to glorify those places of pain we know we must one day attend to. We're eternal optimists, after all who minds going to the hospital if it's Patrick Dempsey holding the knife.
And sure I'm slowly learning to groan when presented with such shows. I groan away, happy to be included in some small way in a group that knows and rolls its' eyes at the extraordinary situations those wacky characters get themselves into. But just because I know the truth doesn't mean it makes me happy.
So thank you Sallie!! You're an amazing writer.
BTW: Meredith would have been sooo dead, come on she didn't breath for like 3 hours!! :-)
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Well, whatever
No one's profession is ever portrayed accurately and with the grit of their real life counterparts on network television. CSI anyone? There are rare exceptions, mostly in the land of cable. Now are people bamboozled by the magic of television. Probably. But most intelligent people know that TV is idealized reality, often almost to the point of absurdity.
I wish my own profession was the way it's been portrayed on TV, but c'est la vie.
It's okay.
All that said, I appreciated reading about your reality. It's a good essay on what it's like in Ordinary Hospital. But the fretting about House being unrealistic, well, um.
And?
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House
I think you may not understand the basic premise of House. Believe it or not, House is only meant to be peripherally a medical show. It is primarily an elaborate homage to Sherlock Holmes. Seriously.
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I Agree, and Lawyer Shows
As someone with a chronic disease (MS) who has spent 10 years as a frequent user of healthcare, I totally understand what the writer was saying. There are caring nurses and doctors, almost all of them got in to the profession to help. Even after years of experience, they keep trying and no one has all the answers. For someone who going through medical issues, it can be frustrating. Sometimes I have felt neglected, ignored...other times I have felt profoundly cared for. Once a male ER nurse yelled at me about how little money they were making. Once a female "home health care" nurse put an IV in me then said she forgot the drug...and asked if she could just come back with it on Monday...We all have horror stories. But also good ones. Overall I am thankful for the men and women who have showed me compassion over the years.
What the writer was saying to me was that the problems go beyond feckless doctors and under-appreciated nurses. They are systemic. Just the word "hospitalist" bothers me. I did not know my family doctor could not put me into the hospital until he told me to go there...and the ER people told me his opinion did not matter. The ONLY opinion that mattered was the hospitalist's. (Insurance doc! They said the hospitalist is "objective" whereas your doctor, too "subjective"). Everything funneled through the ER. And even though I was losing control and feeling in my legs, my issue was beyond the comprehension of the young kids and uneducated people they had in triage. People with colds and sprained ankles went in before me. I knew I could wind up paralyzed. It was hard to keep my cool. The hospitalist tried to say I should go see my family doctor the next day....Of course I had already done that, lol. (It seems funny now I guess). It could have continued in perpetuity. The neurologist on call never showed up. I could have been left there forever, if not for the care of a great contract nurse and a great ER doctor.
So the problems go far, far beyond ambulance chasing lawyers.
Full disclosure: I am a lawyer, and I find I have virtually no tolerance for lawyer shows. Not Ally McBeal, not Boston Legal. They're absurd. And believe me, we have a sense of humor, like those in the medical profession, we have to, but I care about my clients and the problems they are experiencing and I hate watching these soapy law shows. ("The judge denied bail. How could you sleep with my best friend!")
And, full disclosure, my clients are often low income men and women who have been terminated for objecting to illegal activity by their employers, or women who have been brutally sexually harassed, even raped. Or men who worked all their lives for a company only to be shown the door for refusing to send their subordinates to work in an unsafe mine. Devastating consequences...If only people understood the way these events destory the lives of everyday people...
On tv, lawyers are either heroic or comic or evil. Most of the ones I know--we're ordinary. We don't have all the answers. There is no guarantee the judge won't throw your case out, no matter how just. I don't know if the company will settle. I can't promise they won't blackball you. I can't tell you the jury will apply the law instead of their personal biases. We do the best we can. Maybe that's why the law show I liked the best was The Guardian. No one watched, that's why it's no longer around. It dealt with legal aid, no easy answers, no easy ethical decisions, no moral of the story...It was good.
The writer was also saying that the media representations create unreasonable expectations, and I know this is true. People see things on tv or they hear bogus stories (mcdonald's hot coffee lawsuit!) without learning the facts these things are based on...and it creates all kinds of problems, even bad laws get written because of it, for both doctors and lawyers and more importantly their clients.