Who cares. It’s TV and the show was nothing more than a soap opera. Right now in the real world people are dieing from lack of decent health care.

I tired to watch the last one, it was awful and I turned it off after a while.

Love it Jeffe! To answer your question – I care along with millions who viewed – including, ironically, yourself! ER was cutting edge and was a great show with a great run by all TV standards! As the story aged the storylines seemed to keep pace with changing times and while I did miss the old cast from time to time, I found the new folks earned the same respect – obviously because we tuned in week to week, as the old ones! ER, like other great long running TV will be missed, but you can already buy the DVD series, and watch it on a variety of stations!

One hospital show that you aren’t mentioning in the discussion so far is “Scrubs”, which is sort of a combination sitcom/drama that grew out of this hospital drama popularity. “Scrubs” is a show that just keeps going, and I’m a huge fan of the show.

Besides being a sitcom, “Scrubs” offers an ongoing narration for three central characters, and the hospital they work at. The characters grow over the run of the show, as there is a definite sense of continuity.

Oh remember the days of Marcus Welby MD,
my dad would walk through the tv room and ask why I was watching because it was always a subdural hematoma… and damn him, he was always right!

Thanx,
Heidi

House on the other hand is very good, lots of witty banter.
I liked ER in the first few years but after a while it’s just more of the same.

I was medical student at the time ER started. I watched the first episode or one of the first episodes in which one of the doctors put his hand on the abdomen of a very well looking patient, sitting (not lying)on the end of the stretcher and yelled out, “he’s got a triple AAA”. You can’t make that diagnosis by putting a hand on the belly.
I thought it was so inaccurate that I never watched it again.

Sorry Dr. Mark Hoornstra it’s TV! House is not reality, it’s a TV show.

ER is not reality no matter how hard they try.
I don’t remember any episode of ER were they dealt with the cost of that “bus” ride to the hospital. The cost of illness in this country. It can cost a million dollars to have premature baby in this country, a million dollars!

My girlfriend’s father is a retired medical doctor and says that “Scrubs” is the most realistic medical show on TV in how it depicts the relationship between doctors, nurses, and hospital staff.

For Lisa Sanders: One of the interesting things about House is the infinite number of diagnostic tests that are at their disposal. My mother’s doctor in Chicago is an extraordinary diagnostician in addition to being one with a great bedside manner. He answers his own phone! He loves to watch House, and tries to come to a diagnosis before House does. And he once said to me “If I could do all those expensive tests, I could be as good as House too!’ Unless a patient has very deep pockets, it is unlikely that they would get these tests. How realistic is this aspect of House?

Hey! I loved ER, love Scrubs too! But, no mention of M*A*S*H*??? THAT was my ALL-TIME Favorite medical series – a bit of comedy and a dose of seriousness of war and medicine!!! I still enjoy watching re-runs

The format of TV Hospital shows (and Cop shows like Barney Miller) are interesting over the long term because they allow for *anything* to walk in the door for any given episode. It gives them variety.

I tuned in late but was curious if MASH had been mentioned as a medical drama. My father was a physician, board certified in infectious and cardiovascular disease,and had been a coreman in a MASH unit during the Korean war in his youth. He actually found many aspects of MASH more realistic than shows like St Elsewhere and ER.

Tom:

I really enjoy your show…though usually listen at night. I could not disagree more with some of the comments in this half-hour…my disagreement is this…Americans are on the whole uninformed, they are obese, they are diabetic, they are hyper tense, they are lazy, etc. Americans are highly over-medicated …and like swine in the feed lots getting fattened for their slaughter…the massive expenditures on drug marketing develop demand for drugs regardless of the safety (FDA notwithstanding…) where the side affects of the drugs often overwhelm the benefits…the massive investment in medical technologies with little attention to HEALTH…the business decisions that have led to a broken medical system in the USA! “Patients” walk into their doctors office with an advertisement …and they want that drug..and the doctor…too often just writes the prescription.

I offer you that these medical shows have done NOTHING to improve the state of healthcare in the USA. In fact, the history of TV medical shows parallels the collapse of the delivery of medical care in the USA.

Regards!

It’s all about the characters and character interactions. Viewers make a connection with the cast and tune in. All of these medical and crime dramas are the same. They all follow a “cookie-cutter” story structure. There is a problem, try a few times to fix it or catch the criminal, fail, stakes are raised, some ambiguous clue gives an answer, roll credits. Why do people enjoy CSI but not CSI:Miami? House but not Grey’s Anatomy? It has nothing to do with the story, it`s all about the characters.

Interesting show. I did not hear all of it, so you may have touched this point. If not, it is a major gap. I think people’s interest in medical programs stems from a major existential issue. As we move through adolescence into adulthood and mid-life, we all become aware of our mortality, not just intellectually, but existentially. Our bodies begin to change and fail us in gradually greater ways and we are confronted with our mortality. Isn’t at least a part of this huge interest in medical issues a way of confronting, yet not directly, our own fears of illness and death…a way of feeling that some bit of control is available to help us address this reality? Ultimately, I think this is a theological issue — a failure of our faith traditions to provide us with needed meaning and comfort so that we look to other avenues for solice.

The omission of nurses in this discussion is shocking. Do your listeners know that nurses run ER’s—they do the triage, many of the procedures, and the monitoring of patients. When ambulances are diverted it’s usually because of a shortage of nurses. How ER has treated nurses is a hot topic among nurses. But there is no debate about the other shows, such as House. There are no nurses, the doctors do the work of nurses. We have a serious nursing shortage which greatly affects the survival of patients. It seems probable that the screening out of nurses on these shows, and, unfortunately, on On Point, is affecting nurse recruitment. The hyped depiction of physicians seems to have inspired people to go into that field, but how can young people consider nursing when they don’t see it portrayed in the context in which it exists? I’m very disappointed in this On Point episode.

Dr. Sanders and Dr. Hoornstra have been mentioning the improvement in diagnostics in the emergency room over the past few years, at the same time that ER as a show has matured.

One point they are forgetting is that, yes, CT scans and MRIs have improved healthcare, but these TV medical shows always minimize the role of the radiologists in the care of the patient.

I am a radiologist in Boston. In the ER, most patients will go through the radiology department for some kind of study to help diagnose the problem. The radiologist is a doctor who specializes in interpreting the images from CT or MRI or xrays. We then disucss the patient with ER doctors and give them our opinion about what is going on.

It is this kind of behind the scenes work that radiologists do in real life. The TV show ER hardly ever shows the radiologist at work, and patients should know that the radiologists play a key and vital part in the care.

@ Matt – I totally agree, the dynamic between characters on Scrubs is the most realistic I’ve seen on TV, and I enjoy the show as a physician.

Besides the dramatized and exaggerated situations that characters find themselves in on hospital dramas, which ultimately misinform the public as patients because the show is portrayed as “realistic”, these shows provide an opportunity for pharmaceutical companies to market their wares to the masses when they are, in a sense, vulnerable. See Etienne’s comment…

Tom,
As a ER Physician Assistant I can tell you I loved the show. My 4 years in the ER were a real close up of life and death. But I don’t think the public live their lifes any differently from seeing a detached TV show, otherwise we would have had National Healthcare by now hands down. In the ER when we had an infant come in with SIDS we were as a group depressed for weeks. I can remember going home and hugging my kids and appreciating what I had from a deep place that I don’t think you get from a TV show. Living this experience can transform you, but I belive they came as close as a “Show” can. The ER taught me how great it is to be a Humanist and we all don’t get the same breaks in life but we share the same future. I love caring for my fellow man more and more every day as a result. Kevin Traina PA_C

I enjoyed ER but was always irked that social workers were rarely in evidence. There were so many instances when they would have been called in. In the show, they were called in to either a) screw things up or b) walk away with the abused kid to deal with the problem off screen, negligible dialog. For a show that tried to break away from cliches and stereotypes, social workers got very short shrift.

I’m glad to hear the positive comments about Scrubs form other physicians. I’ve always thought this show, despite its sitcom style, somehow portrayed the hospital enviroment most accurately.