Hard exam bruh12/16/2023 ![]() ![]() A little tape can go a long way in the OR. I have actually written to the show to tell the producers that if they are going to zoom in on a patient’s face, they should make the depiction as realistic as possible. If patients’ eyes are not taped shut during surgery, they can get corneal abrasions. These anesthetics paralyze the muscles that help you breathe, so patients taking them are temporarily unable to breathe on their own.Īlso, I have never seen surgical patients with their eyes taped shut on the show. If that were to happen, the patient could go into respiratory distress and die because of the powerful anesthetics in his or her system. In real life, we always use tape because the tube can easily slip from its correct position. And 99% of the time, the endotracheal tube is not held in place with tape. During surgeries on “Grey’s Anatomy,” viewers often see a close-up of an intubated patient’s face. A recurring error on the show that really irks me has to do with intubation. While some of the misrepresentations on “Grey’s Anatomy” are understandable-after all, the show’s purpose is to entertain-the medical errors on the show are just astounding. Once new physicians match into a general surgery residency, orthopedics and neurosurgery are not options for them unless they want to switch residency programs. Moreover, general surgery residents do not typically rotate through orthopedics or neurosurgery as they do on “Grey’s Anatomy.” Those specialties have their own residencies. Residents do not arrive in the morning and pick their service based on which attending has the best cases that day (or which attending they are having a secret affair with). Scheduling is not a free-for-all as fans of “Grey’s Anatomy” are led to believe. Surgical residents usually are assigned to a particular service for a set amount of time, often a month. Trainees at real-world hospitals won’t find themselves assigned to brain surgery one day, pediatric surgery the next day and plastic surgery the day after that. The schedules of the show’s residents are very unusual compared with the schedules of nonfictional surgical residents. An intern who bypasses a chief to bring important patient information to an attending would irritate both the chief and the attending. Yet “Grey’s Anatomy” makes no distinction of resident seniority.Īs an intern, I did not run to an attending before speaking to a senior resident as interns regularly do on the show. In most surgery residency programs, junior residents report to the senior residents, who in turn report to the attending physicians. I also see interns and residents on the show committing command-chain faux pas that would be frowned upon, or not permitted, in real hospitals. ![]() On the show, the interns appear to have bypassed the floor work and consult stages and function like chief residents in the OR, which is highly unrealistic. Second-year residents (at least in my program, and it does vary) typically see consults. Surgical interns do a lot of scut work, such as drawing stat labs, putting in orders for nurses, talking to patients’ families, rounding with social workers to discuss patient placement upon discharge, accompanying patients to tests, and obtaining patients’ signatures on consent-to-surgery forms. They rarely see the inside of the OR, and when they do, it’s usually to assist with an emergency or a run-of-the-mill case. Typically, interns on a surgical service take care of the patients on the floor. I certainly was surprised.ĭuring my intern year, my biggest pet peeve was watching the interns on the show go into the operating room for big, complicated cases such as brain surgery every day. I would not be surprised if medical students watching the show are shocked and disillusioned when they finally rotate through surgery and find out what the surgical world is really like. By portraying the residents’ lives as exciting, dramatic whirlwinds, the show makes real-world residency seem less difficult. But I dislike the way the show overglamorizes the lives of the residents and often presents false medical information. I understand that “Grey’s Anatomy’s” producers have to sometimes sacrifice realism to engage their audience and garner ratings. When I became a general surgery intern myself last year, these discrepancies became even more obvious to me. Back then I was a premed, so I watched the drama about the lives of surgical residents and physicians with great interest, even though I knew many aspects of the residents’ lives were exaggerated or just plain incorrect. “Grey’s Anatomy” has been one of my favorite TV shows since its inception in 2005. ![]()
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