Letters to the Editor
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Ordinary Hospital = Real Hospital
Excellent essay about hospital reality, for anyone who has not spent much time in one. Nurses run the place; nurses, nurse aides, candy stripers and various admin staff make everything happen.
Doctors solve the hardest problems, make diagnoses and prescribe treatments. Surgeons do something almost miraculous. But they are part of a very large team. If the other players are incompetent or unprofessional (like in a lot of developing world hospitals), even a great doctor cannot save your life.
As for TV, well, anyone who has ever watched a TV program or movie about what they do for a living knows well that TV is not reality. Even documentaries and the news rarely get it right.
Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) once said, "Reality should be more like television", e.g., everyone should be beautiful, and all problems should be resolved by homilies in 45 minutes.
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It's a TV show!
It is a TV show! Entertainment - hollywood....
Get it?
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Great article
I've never liked house - something about the trio of plastic looking humourless droids who work with House, and maybe a bit of disappointment at seeing Laurie parade his tics and twitches around, over the top all of the time.
I have consistently impressed with the Nurses that I've interacted with, and it has always struck me that the nurse knows much, much more about my health then the doctors, who seem to breeze in, grunt out as few words as possible, and breeze out. Thank goodness for nurses.
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re--dr and hospital tv shows
Back to the days of the tv shows "Ben Casey" and "Dr. Kildare" tv shows about medical settings have always been absurdly UNrealistic. For the most part so are cop shows, lawyer shows, army shows and sitcoms. It's tv.
If you want realism rent Paddy C's old movie "Hospital."
Why was this article a lead story on Salon? It's just total fluff.
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House
Yet another Salon article informing us that TV often doesn't reflect reality.
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What it is
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?
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Universal health care doesn't work?
In 2004, I was in Italy to celebrate my sister's wedding. A few days after I arrived, a small infection in a finger had become a big infection. The owner of the place we were staying at said I needed immediate medical treatment. Like most Ameican's, I said that I didn't have health insurance, so a doctor was out of the question. She laughed and informed me that it would be free... or if they charged me, it would be less then 100 euros.
I went down to the local hospital, and went through admission, which was also a triage procedure, and received a piece of paper (with the lowest priority) and told where to go. Within 40 minutes of arriving at the hospital, with the least priority of neccessity for treatment, I was in a doctor's office with a doctor and two nurses. They assessed the finger, and decided that a small surgery was required to drain the infection. This was done, and medicine was applied to the wound and expertly bandaged.
I then was told to come back three times in the ten days that I was there, where my wound was cleaned and one more small surgery performed. Each time that I came back, my wait was around half of an hour or less from when I arrived. The courtesy and professionalism that I received was remarkable. The standard of care was perfect. The wound healed, and I am forever grateful that my condition arose in a country that has national health, as I might have forgone medical treatment here, and perhaps suffered greatly because of that decision.
It is part of the big lie that a national health plan does not work. What is certain, is that the private health system in America is bloated beyond sustainability, with many layers of profiteers taking their piece as you move from the emergency room through a course of treatment. The big lie is perpetuated by our hospital dramatic series that portray, even in the urban hospital of ER, a level of treatment and functionality that simply doesn't exist. This is, as so many problems of neglect in America, not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue- it is a moral issue..