TV "Accuracy"

I was just reading a story about medical and legal consultants hired by Hollywood to make sure their television dramas have the air of accuracy. That led me to chuckle about "Grey's Anatomy." I know that show has been popular forever, but I only got hooked on it this year. I started watching it only because it was on between "Ugly Betty" and "Men in Trees."

One of the continuing reactions I have to "Grey's Anatomy" is that those docs have wa-a-a-y too much time. First of all, let's be clear. It's not a medical show; it's a medical soap opera. The show focuses on who is in love with/sleeping with whom at any one point in time. In order to facilitate this soap opera, then, the docs end up spending more time interacting with each other than with their patients.

For example: A show earlier this year featured a ferry crashing, or blowing up, or something of the sort, causing a mass casualty accident for the Seattle hospital. Patients were flooding in with all sorts of injuries. So what do we see? When Meredith is injured, her fellow surgical interns end up lingering outside the door where she is getting treatment, worrying about what would happen to her. Hello? That hospital must be incredibly overstaffed to be able to have a gaggle of doctors loitering in the hallway during a mass casualty incident. Not to mention another intern who spent time going through bodybags to see if he could help identify one of the patients. Hmmm... there were no living patients who needed his attention at the time? Hard to believe.

A more recent incident that raised my eyebrow showed the obstetrical surgeon doing an ultrasound of a pregnant patient. Now, the more likely scenario would be that the doc wouldn't even be in the room, while an ultrasound technician did the test and later delivered the images to the doc. And if, for some unusual reason, the doc urgently wanted to see the results, she might have stood there watching while the technician did the test. But in the world of Grey, docs do everything themselves, from ultrasound tests to searches of body bags for patient identification.

And then there's the story line of the surgeon who oversees the interns starting up a free clinic at the hospital. Yes, that' s very nice... but surgeons generally are too busy doing surgery to run free clinics... Yet this character seems to do it all: surgery, oversight of surgical interns, supervision of the free clinic. So far, at least since I've been watching, she's the only one who hasn't managed to have an affair. At least she's been too busy.

One last quibble: The show has referred to the group of fledgling docs who are the core of the drama as "interns." And they all want to be surgeons. And they spend a lot of time either in surgery or watching surgery. Yet in my glancing familiarity with medical education, an intern is a medical school graduate in the first year of residency. While some may be sure what they want to specialize in, a specialty usually isn't declared in that first year. Instead, interns rotate among a variety of specialties throughout the year. Yet Grey's interns seem to spend most of their time either in the ER or the surgical suite. (When they're not in each others' beds, that is.) (Or interns popping into medical faculty's beds -- or into supply closets. Is that ethical?)

And the faculty, the full-fledged specialists, whether ob-gyn, neurosurgeon or cardiothoracic surgeon, also follow patients all the way from the ER to surgery to post-surgical follow-up. Never mind that, in the real world, trauma docs would be handling patients in the ER while the surgeons would be on another floor, studying CT scans or X-rays or whatever images get sent up, plotting the surgery, scrubbing up, and often not even meeting the patient until they're draped, under anesthesia and practically anonymous. But keeping docs in their specialty niches would make for a pretty choppy story line...