Which Hospital Drama is the most realistic?

[Meredith]

I know it ain't ER because if a person comes into the ER with a hangnail they open their chest with the chest spreader and fight with over drive drama to save the patient.


Which medical drama is the closest to actual real reality?

I mean some overdo it with the drama and some are just bland, which one is most realistic?

 

[BigFoot]

^ Um.... none of them?

 

[Canadave]

From everything I've heard, Scrubs.

 

[Super Grover]

Marcus Welby.

I hear that Emergency! was fairly accurate for the times.

 

[Emher]

Slightly amusing and scare thing is that apparantly a lot of people working at hospitals, doctors and others alike, say that Scrubs is by far the most realistic.

 

[TrekNut87]

I'd say Scrubs is the most realistic.

 

[Australis]

Current ones? None. Granted my only experience has been when one of my kids was very very ill when a baby, and that was pretty grim, but it was different to anything on teev.

I suppose it's hard to judge becuase the drama is told from the staff's point of view, when we only experience it as patients. Any doctors or nurses here?

 

[Skywalker]

General Hospital.

 

[mr.peany]

Id have to say Scrubs as well. ER has it's moments when dealing with its less 'extreme' cases. House and Grey's certainly aint.

In fact, not once have I ever seen doctors act in such an unprofessional manner as the doctors presented in todays medical dramas.

 

[Jax]

E.R for the first few years probably had that award but when they do have medical situations, Scrubs seem to deal them out quite realistically.

 

[TremblingBluStar]

Certainly not any I've seen. Though, to be honest, the only medical show I've seen an entire episode of is Crossing Jordan, and that is more a medical/crime show where the M.E. does more case solving than the actual detectives.

 

[Meredith]

Slightly amusing and scare thing is that apparantly a lot of people working at hospitals, doctors and others alike, say that Scrubs is by far the most realistic.

I am amazed that scrubs is getting so many responses, though I kinda suspected, the characters on scrubs while wacky do seem to be very human and they deal with death very well on that show.

 

[AlboOfBorg]

Certainly not House. Let's see...

- House and his staff should be either in jail or fired for everything they've done (breaking and entering, kidnapping, violating medical rules, etc.)
- It's unrealistic that House's staff would put up with the abuse that they do in real life
- How many rare medical conditions can one Diagnostic department deal with?!?! Doctors probably only face a handful of the situations House and co. deal with during their entire careers!

 

[Bob The Skutter]

Surely it's Casualty...

 

[Peach Wookiee]

Grey's Anatomy. With the obvious exception of doctors doing it all the time, apparently, they're pretty good at keeping medical stuff accurate.

 

[RobertScorpio]

I know it ain't ER because if a person comes into the ER with a hangnail they open their chest with the chest spreader and fight with over drive drama to save the patient.


Which medical drama is the closest to actual real reality?

I mean some overdo it with the drama and some are just bland, which one is most realistic?

General Hospital by far...in the 80s we had a dude trying to freeze the world, terrorist trying to blow up Mt Rushmore, and aliens..

Rob

 

[Holdfast]

Scrubs first season hits all the right notes regarding the emotional impact/reaction to finally being a doctor after medical school. In that sense, it's the most realistic.

From the rest, I recall that ER (again, more towards the early seasons) was the best for revising for medical finals, because it dropped the right hints at the right time to guide you to a diagnosis and work up a management plan. The pacing worked nicely for that.

In terms of actual realism? None of them. Though I try to live up to Frasier....

 

[The Nth Doctor]

All of you should be ashamed of yourselves for not mentioning the obvious answer:

St. Elsewhere (final scene aside).

 

[teya]

Grey's Anatomy. With the obvious exception of doctors doing it all the time, apparently, they're pretty good at keeping medical stuff accurate.

Let's see... An intern cuts a line on a transplant patient's VAD--the patient she happens to be in love with--so that he'll be sick enough to jump to the head of the line for the heart. He dies anyway. She gets caught, the other interns back her up--and next season she is not only *not in jail*, but back to work as normal.

Um, no. Gray's is so divorced from reality, it doesn't really qualify as a medical drama.

And that's from 30 years working in hospitals.

 

[teya]

From the rest, I recall that ER (again, more towards the early seasons) was the best for revising for medical finals, because it dropped the right hints at the right time to guide you to a diagnosis and work up a management plan. The pacing worked nicely for that.

Interesting. I used to tell coder-trainees to code the cases presented in ER. It was great practice.

Early on, ER did pretty good. The award-winning episode "Love's Labor Lost" in which Greene loses a mother who delivers in the ER, could have been written from a case at the first hospital I worked in. Greene was walking away, thinking it was done, and mom and baby would be fine, and someone called out, "She's bleeding out!" and I said out loud to the TV, "OMG, it's DIC."

Sure enough, it was.

It was such an eerie watching experience--to know exactly what was happening and what was going to happen because you'd seen it happen in real life.