| The Hollywood Issue | Spring 2009 |
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Changing Channels Don’t get me wrong: I watch television. I can even go lowbrow. I’ve tuned into The Girls Next Door, for instance, a reality show about a trio of buxom twenty-somethings at the Playboy Mansion. You can’t plunge much lower than that. But I avoid small-screen medical dramas as fervently as I do adjustable rate mortgages. I didn’t always shun such fare. Before I became a doctor, I slavishly followed television dramas. Dr. Kildare was a handsome, get-the-job-done kind of guy, gliding from one medical crisis to the next with nary a misplaced hair. Ben Casey—that virile, hirsute man of few words—was always scrubbing for surgery, preparing to save the day with his take-no-prisoners attitude. And Marcus Welby was a father figure who soothed frightened children and frantic parents. Along with my own pediatrician, these men informed my dreams about what the medical world had to offer. Once I became a doctor, though, the real world of medicine replaced my fantasy one. During the harried years of medical school, residency, and early practice, I lost track of small-screen heroes. Decades later, when I finally began watching television again, I was surprised to discover that my taste for medical dramas had soured. In fact, when I accidentally clicked onto such shows, I couldn’t change the channel quickly enough. I began to wonder why I now found television medical dramas so alarming. One obvious reason was my timing; my television watching takes place at the dinner hour. Watching Dr. 90210 eviscerate a section of adipose tissue while I’m busy building my own lacks appeal. And I certainly don’t want to witness vomiting, bleeding, or other bodily processes while eating. In the days of Marcus Welby, bodily exorcisms were never revealed, much less celebrated; directors today seem determined to fill each scene with images of oozing wounds and the sounds of retching. More significantly, though, watching medical dramas is too much a busman’s holiday for my tastes. Perhaps politicians are glued to C-SPAN each night, but at day’s end I’m not up for rehashing medical practice through the prism of Hollywood. And that prism is distorted. Most of my day includes mind-numbing tasks of questionable intellectual stimulation broken only occasionally by a diagnostic challenge, a family tragedy, or an actual emergency. Television doctors seem to race from aneurysms about to burst, to the gaping wounds of bullet-riddled bodies, to their own melodramatic personal crises. It’s not that drama doesn’t occur in emergency departments every day; it’s simply more nuanced. By highlighting the adrenaline-pumping aspects of our jobs—however entertaining—these shows ignore the softer and often more rewarding parts of medicine. And while most of us are tuned into our colleagues’ personal lives, we aren’t wasting precious patient time consoling a nurse about a broken engagement or interceding in a colleague’s drunk-driving conviction. The frantic pace of most clinical settings hardly allows for such heart-to-heart confidences over coffee. It hardly allows for coffee. Finally, a word about the physical appearances of the actors in these dramas: No offense to real-world health providers, but where do the casting directors find the eye candy who play those doctors and nurses? Many fine-looking medical professionals do roam the corridors of real hospitals and clinics, but most don’t have time to apply makeup. They often troop around in bedraggled scrubs or slightly worn white jackets. They have circles under their eyes and wrinkles from many years of smiling, worrying, and even weeping. Yet the true beauty of these professionals—the incredible sense of purpose, compassion, and commitment to delivering quality care that radiates from them—doesn’t shine through on the television screen. And what’s my remedy for such a loss? A quick press of a button.
Victoria McEvoy ’75, an HMS assistant professor of pediatrics, is the medical director and chief of pediatrics for Mass General West Medical Group in Waltham, Massachusetts. Photo: Martin Barraud/Stone+/Getty images |
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