It says something about the quality of most medical TV programs when I can watch them without having major flashbacks and panic attacks. They have become so unrealistic as to seem almost cartoon like. Last night I watched two such programs, The Good Doctor and Nurses.
The Good doctor always seems unrealistic to me, but last night was infuriating. There was a patient needing surgery but didn’t want narcotics because of a previous addiction. The surgeons spent the entire episode trying to figure out how they were going to accomplish this. Well, call me crazy but I would maybe use one of the many other forms of sedation that are not narcotics. Propofol comes to mind. Maybe they ran out? Then there was the drug mule that needed to have surgery because the drugs had gotten stuck in his intestine. They managed to remove the drugs, but they didn’t want the patient carrying the drugs to get in trouble so they found a way to delay calling the police. The show ended with the patient stealing the drugs back after the surgery, and how shocked all the doctors were by this. “Sob. We gave him a chance to turn his life around and he returned to his wicked ways.” Did no one there think that this outcome was inevitable? Someone, somewhere was going to miss those drugs eventually. Having lost the drugs, the patient would most likely have been in a little bit of trouble with whoever those drugs were being carried for. Saving his life, just so he could be killed later by some vindictive drug dealer seems rather counterproductive to me. Also, does anyone else just hate the girlfriend in the show? The theme of the show seems to be that Sean is abnormal and needs to find ways to conform, and the girlfriend seems like a big part of that.
Next up was the second episode of nurses. Now, I have already stated that I find this show a little disappointing. Last nights episode certainly didn’t help to raise my opinion. First off, who talks like that? Whoever writes the dialogue needs to be fired immediately. The whole show sounds like a badly made instructional video for first-year nursing students. As nurses, we don’t sit around all day explaining to one another what it is to be a nurse. Also, I would be very curious where they came up with the idea that nurses look after one patient at a time. Show the reality of nurses workload if you want to gain my praise. The truth is that we look after way too many people most of the time. That kind of individual attention just isn’t possible. Also, nurses are usually hired by a department rather than a hospital. That means that we already know where we are going to be working. We don’t get assigned areas each day. I also have to say that it would be highly unusual to hire a male nurse for maternity.
I’m sure I will think of some more comments in the coming days.