Desperate times call for desperate measures. Halfway through winter break, with all the current TV shows on a holiday hiatus, I had grown tired of dabbling in The West Wing, Seinfeld and Weeds and without an engaging television drama to amuse me, I took a desperate measure. I turned to a show that I’d promised myself to never watch: the bastard child of the soap opera and the medical show—Grey’s Anatomy.
It was everything I expected it to be—racy, captivating and, as far as I can tell, grossly inaccurate concerning what it’s like to be a doctor. I know that watching Grey’s Anatomy or House MD to learn about medicine is comparable to watching pro wrestling for the athletic competition. But it seems to me that this latest revival of medical shows (Grey’s Anatomy, House MD, Scrubs, Nip/Tuck) is having repercussions beyond TV’s usual misinformation, negatively affecting the medical community, aspiring doctors and, most importantly, me.
Consider an article that appeared in The New York Times last November, ”When Young Doctors Strut Too Much of Their Stuff,” written by Erin Marcus, a doctor in Miami. She complains of her younger colleagues wearing attire “more suitable…for a night out on the town…Every day, it seems, I see a bit of midriff here, a plunging neckline there. Open-toed sandals, displaying brightly manicured toes, seem ubiquitous,” Dr. Marcus writes. “One colleague commented that a particularly statuesque student ‘must have thought all her male patients were having strokes’ when she walked in their exam room wearing a low-cut top and a miniskirt.”
Dr. Marcus doesn’t cite medical dramas as the cause for these transgressions, but it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to make the correlation. Part of Marcus’s frustration can be attributed to a generational gap, but the problem smacks of television’s influence on a younger generation of doctors. Meredith Grey, Grey’s Anatomy’s protagonist, so worried about following in the footsteps of her mother, a world-renowned surgeon, is leaving her mark after all.
While my own my experience with these medical dramas only goes so far as House, a little Grey’s Anatomy, and two episodes of Scrubs, my high school friend Chuck has watched it all. So when he announced to me several weeks ago that he was thinking about becoming a doctor, I knew the precise cause of his sudden interest in the medical profession. Chuck has enough sense to separate the TV shows from the harsh reality of becoming a doctor, not to mention that he’s already in business school, but others might actually follow through on this urge.
Just as Harry Potter makes kids want to go to boarding school, medical dramas make kids want to become doctors. And just as kids arrive at boarding school to discover that magic isn’t real and that late-night adventures with your invisibility cloak is actually code for 8 o’clock check-in, the prospective doctors are going to discover that being a doctor is more hard work than it is browbeating the truth out of your patient or having an affair with the resident doctor.
I realized how much these shows, House in particular, had affected me last semester when I came down with a fever, runny nose, and sore throat that wouldn’t go away. Matters only got worse when I went to the doctor and after an examination, he admitted he was stumped. I couldn’t stop myself picturing a group of doctors writing my symptoms on a white board and spiritedly arguing my diagnosis. “Everything points to a severe case of heptoglemal thiomosis,” one would say. “But that doesn’t account for the sore throat,” another would counter. “Let’s break into his dorm room and try to find toxins,” the third would suggest.
I spent the next two days awaiting the results of several tests and imagining myself in a hospital, my condition steadily deteriorating until the doctors had narrowed the possible solutions to two—one that would save my life and one that would kill me.
Just as I was resigning myself to this fate, the doctor called me back: I had strep throat. One round of antibiotics later, I was cured. If only the other damage done by these medical dramas had such a convenient solution.
