The Doctor in House

From American Medical News...

TV doctors' flaws become bioethics teaching moments
Medical dramas have big followings among students, and professors say the shows can highlight ethical dilemmas.
By Kevin B. O'Reilly

In a December 2008 study in The American Journal of Bioethics:

"The survey of nearly 400 medical and nursing students at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland found that 76% of doctors in training watch 'House' and 73% watch ABC's hospital soap opera 'Grey's Anatomy.' Nearly 40% watch NBC's 'ER' and one in five tunes in 'Nip/Tuck,' which airs on the FX cable network. Eighty-five percent of medical students said they watched a medical drama in the prior year."

The TV dramas present teaching opportunities in bioethics for medical students.

The article cites Pittsburgh bioethicist Mark Wicclair, PhD, who taught my undergraduate honors bioethics class at WVU.

Read the whole article at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2009/01/26/prl20126.htm

These shows are wildly popular. I find they portray doctors as far sexier than in real life.

The academic rigor of the medical cases upon which the plots are based is interesting, and the less common diseases the shows highlight can bring attention to conditions that otherwise wouldn't get much play in other media.

As for the bioethics -- the dilemmas provide drama for the episodes. Clever to use drama as a teaching tool. If these shows were in their full glory in my training days, would they have prepared me for some of my more memorable ethical dilemmas -- when the residents disagreed with the attending on terminal care, or when a patient in the public eye refused an HIV test?

Hollywood is Hollywood, where everything gets neatly solved in less than an hour. The hospital is the hospital, where situations are more protracted and not as clear cut as on TV.