Television Cretins

Coming to a general surgical practise and a hospital near you, doctors proud to have been trained and professionally instructed through the medium of intensely viewing television medical techniques. Forget years of imbibing medical data and learning how to diagnose and treat patients. It's a tedious and cumbersome ritual that has now been replaced by eager young doctors-in-training learning life-saving techniques from television shows like ER, peopled by fictional MDs, who really know their stuff.

That appears to be the finding of critical-care specialists at the University of Alberta Hospital, publishing in the journal Resuscitation. "We were a bit shocked", according to Dr. Peter Brindley. "The important lesson here is that we can't leave medical education to chance alone." What an amazing conclusion. My doctor, the television freak.

It appears that when doctors at the University of Alberta Hospital enquired of their medical students and residents where they had learned their peculiarly inadequate intubation techniques, so critical for ensuring longevity in medically distressed patients when they're incapable of breathing on their own, the response of many was that they had 'learned the procedure' from watching television medical dramas.

Verisimilitude is not recognized as a value feature in most television programs revolving around any kind of professionalism, much less that of medicine. Yet these huge brains studying to be medical professionals simply assumed that what they were so engrossed in viewing on television represented quality medical treatment at its finest.

Their puzzled superiors then undertook to view those programs to discover, predictably, that on those shows the fictional MDs and nurses performed the procedure incorrectly each and every time. How would they know any better? Why would they, after all; they're actors, not doctors.

Remember that old game kids used to play, sitting around in a circle, whispering a legend to one another, and when it finally reached the ears of the last child who was then encouraged to repeat it aloud, the final legend resembled nothing whatever of the original. Utterly distorted in the passage from one ear to another.

The investigating doctor-instructors discovered that while a proportion of their students took their instruction in a lecture hall, they later practised on real patients with insufficient supervision, the resulting procedures poorly done on critically ill patients; those same doctors later teaching their ill-conceived practise nonetheless to others.

While many others learned the protocol revolving around the insertion of a tube down the windpipe to enable a patient to be hooked up to a mechanical ventilator in life-and-death situations, through 'trial and error'. Aided substantially by 'tips' picked up while viewing medical television dramas where, invariably, the patient's head is improperly adjusted for intubation to properly proceed.

These are medical-school graduates training in specialities like anaesthesia, surgery and emergency care. And here we are, the ailing public, entrusting our frail bodies to the knowledgeable professionalism of medical students too lazy, too uncaring and too sloppily stupid to attain proper technique capabilities. Trusting to the infallibly-trustworthy protocol seen on television.

As though it's not bad enough that Canada hasn't enough medical professionals to adequately look to the health needs of a growing population. Now we're alerted as well to the sad and sorry fact that the newer generation of medics, unquestioningly enthused by what they see on television cannot separate the amateur from the professional, fact from fiction.

The pain of it all.