Nora Brennan, '26
Many people watch TV shows and movies for entertainment and a way to distract themselves from their own lives. However, many people believe that everything they see in this form of entertainment is real. This explains how almost half of adults get their believed medical information from TV. That being said, many things in these shows are certainly not real and affect people’s perceptions of what happens in real life. This highlights how great the influence of these shows on people can be, only emphasizing the importance of showing correct information and procedures.
Inaccurate representations range from swift recoveries to large amounts of blood, but CPR is one of the main things that seems to be misrepresented. Many times, CPR is done incorrectly. A study published in 2021 looked at 216 CPR attempts in 836 TV dramas that showed incorrect compression rates and depth. This gives people an incorrect idea of what CPR looks like and how it is performed. Furthermore, CPR is often presented as saving lives about 75% of the time, which is 10 times more than it happens in real life.
Other things that these TV shows incorrectly portray include swift hospital recoveries that give false hope to the people watching. However, in real life, patients may have to stay in the hospital for longer periods. For example, in Grey’s Anatomy, 50% of people left after less than a week after a serious injury, while 20% of actual patients in the real world left in the same amount of time. Additionally, dramatic scripts show surgeons in operating rooms without masks and surgeries happening in random places. In reality, surgeries never take place anywhere but in the operating room. Dr. Peter Chai, who teaches emergency medicine and medical toxicology at the University of Massachusetts says, “If the bullet is in, it stays in until they’re in an operating room.” Many of these outside hospital procedures also seem to include DIY solutions that the doctors make on the spot. These solutions seem to save the person's life, albeit unrealistically.
To try and prevent these errors from happening, a group was formed called the Physician’s Advisory Committee (PAC) in the 1950s. Their job was to review scripts, help find props, and show actors how to properly hold a scalpel: all things that made the shows more accurate. However, they disbanded in 1980. Similarly, shows like Grey’s Anatomy and ER both use medical advisors for information but seem to ignore them because of the wrong information in both.
While it seems that medical advisors for these shows are ineffective, there are other ways to make it clear that it’s inaccurate. If these shows choose to display inaccurate medical information, they should have a disclaimer or warning to inform people that this cannot happen in real life. Choosing to watch more accurate medical shows, like Scrubs, can also provide people with a more realistic view of what the hospital is actually like. Doing research about what’s accurate and what’s not in these shows can also help save people from believing these fake procedures. Make sure to understand that the show you are watching is not real in order to keep yourself from falling into that trap.