Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
How it’s really done.
As y’all know, I can’t bear to watch TV medical dramas. St. Elsewhere was the last one I watched regularly. ER made me scream in the first two minutes, and I haven’t watched it since; House struck me as contrived, and I’m sorry, but Hugh Laurie can do much better than this one-note character.
One of the things that irks me about TV medical dramas is the way they mess up on simple things. Either (A) the producers are too cheap to pop for a medical consultant, or (B) their medical consultant knows tons about rheumatology and zilch about anything else, or (C) their medical consultant is top notch, but their writers are too arrogant to take expert advice. “What do you mean, ’10 grams of epinephrine, stat!” is ridiculous? I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous — you’re ridiculous! Nyah, nyah!”
With that in mind, I bring you the real way a doc should get an emergency airway using nothing but a Swiss Army Knife: cricothyrotomy (from Boston University).
Let me know if you have trouble accessing that movie.
Questions?
D.
my questions: how about Scrubs? Ever watch that one? and where’s your paean to timmeh? all the bloggers are doing it.
I know how you feel, but with medical shows, I don’t think the writers/producers care because they know the public won’t question anything, and it’s more about the personal drama going on with the characters than it is about medical accuracy.
I feel the same way about the inane teacher shows they’ve had over the years,though I did love Boston Public (David Kelly rocks).
Sorry…I still love Grey’s Anatomy.
At first i loved House because it did seem to try to have at least some semblance of medical accuracy (I used to Google some of the bizarre symptoms and diseases they came up with to check to see if they were remotely connected). And it used to be all about the disease at hand. Now it’s become a soap opera like so many other medical shows. It’s too bad.
It’s a risk of watching any show that touches on your own specialty. I can guarantee that almost any TV drama that has any content related to programming, the internet, or hacking has purchased a one-way ticket on the FAIL boat. And when they do subculture stuff? FAIL, with an extra super-sized side of FAIL.
I suppose I should be relieved that the personal lives of computer geeks aren’t interesting enough to warrant an entire TV series. Colorful supporting roles, yes; lead, not so much…
Kate, re paean to Timmeh: I won’t speak ill of the dead. At least, not of the freshly dead. Interesting, isn’t it, how anyone at DKos saying anything less than laudatory about Timmeh is getting troll-rated to hell?
Sis: I’ve never watched Grey’s Anatomy — not more than a few minutes, anyway. Odd, since I have a thing for Sandra Oh. Well, you know me and my hankering for Canadian women 😉
Mauigirl: from the few episodes I watched, I think House did a fair job of accuracy. It pained me to see Hugh Laurie, such an iridescent comedian, reduced to a broken old grump.
ps: You mean WarGames isn’t REAL???
We in the community were all appalled at the short-lived “The American Embassy” by Fox in 2002. Much, much was wrong. A friend of mine and I wanted to write our own show (working title = Embassy!), but weren’t sure how episodes such as “The Final Voyage”, which centers on repatriating the remains of an elderly American who died on a cruise ship, and it’s sequel “This Old Box”, which focuses on the extraordinary efforts to get the effects of the deceased back to the next of kin in the U.S. Then the box in question would resurface all season as it continued to be bounced by the military post office, was returned as too big for the diplomatic pouch, etc. We all thought it would be riveting, even with having the attractive young star have sex in the bathroom of the plane on her flight over to take up her post (part of the opening of the Fox season).
More recently, a colleague of mine and I speculated about whether there’s Iraq war porn (I’m sure there is – we didn’t check) and proposed our own feature film concept: Vice Consul Candi Darling specializing in probing interviews, getting prospective immigrants to the U.S. to spill, spill, spill it all in “Backdoor to Baghdad”!
Of course there’s Iraq war porn. It’s called Abu Ghraib.
sorry, sorry, but it’s that old problem with the English language not differentiating between pornography and pornography.
TV medical dramas mess up on things because Tommy Westphall doesn’t know much about medical procedures and stuff. 😉