And you thought the medicine on Trauma was bad…
When a group of doctors began noticing that their medical students were routinely using a flawed technique for intubations, they asked the students where they had learned their skills. The answer? TV, of course.
80 medical students were surveyed about their faulty technique, and many reported they had picked up tips from TV shows like ER. When doctors reviewed a full season of that show to see what was going on, they discovered that in all 22 intubations visible on screen, the head positioning was wrong. The students were blithely repeating what they’d seen the likes of John Stamos doing instead of practicing proper techniques learned from seasoned educators.
TV medicine can have detrimental effects in other ways. A 1996 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 75% of the cardiac arrest patients on three popular tv dramas (ER, Chicago Hope and Rescue 911) were revived, as opposed to the real-life rate of 15%. This led many lay people to disbelieve doctors’ opinions and think miracles were going to happen for them or their loved ones. ER producers have claimed that they deliberately made the action fast-paced to keep viewers interested, instead of detailing the ‘quiet, often boring’ reality of many emergency rooms.
But it brings up the debate – what responsibility, if any, does TV have when it comes to portraying medicine or a medical profession accurately? Does limp, half-hearted, fake CPR on actors with perfectly sound heart rhythms influence how the public – or medical students for that matter – would approach a real cardiac arrest patient? If some comedian tries to defibrillate someone using jumper cables and a car battery, will there be a spate of copycats? And if Trauma portrays paramedics as swaggering Ricky Rescue types who use the back of their rigs as love nests, how will the public perception of EMS be affected?
It’s also worth remembering that it was TV characters like Johnny Gage and shows like Emergency! and ER that were responsible for a generation of young people choosing emergency medicine as a career.
Filed under EMS On the Side by on Oct 6th, 2009. Comment. 
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Comments on And you thought the medicine on Trauma was bad…
I have never been as successful at cooking as Emril seems to be on the food network. Maybe I just need more pork fat.
Anecdotally a lot of EMS providers thank Emergency for their EMS career. I am interested in the research. Also the generation that watched Emergency (or at least thinks they remember watching Emergency) is probably a small fraction of current EMS providers.
As bad as this makes all medical professionals look you have to wonder who would fill out a survey this way?
Question: Where did you learn your advanced air way technique?
Answer: I study many video resources including but not limited to “House”, “ER”, “M*A*S*H”, and of course “Emergency!”
Doubt it. I bet this is more like it.
Question: Mr/Mrs inexperienced intubatior which DVR event do you record in the vain hopes of watching “Scrubs” or “Trick my truck”?
Its pretty easy to make a survey say anything you want. Assuming there was even a study done.
I think the survey was devised because so many students were making the same kinds of mistakes, and they wanted to find out where they were getting their bad technique from. At least the students told the truth about it so their form could be corrected.