Reality

People ask me at times what I think of House or ER, or some other TV drama about medicine. When I say that these shows aren't very interesting to me, I suppose they think that it's because I think that I don't like them because they show some seemy dark side of medicine that we're trying to hide.

Aside from the fact that House is such a distorted portrayal of medical logic, the biggest problem I have is that these shows do not portray anything much resembling life as we know it, in-or-outside of medicine.

Perhaps the biggest complaint I have is similar to one of my reactions to the various Star Trek, where life in the 23rd or whatever century is portrayed as being honest, kind, fair, and in short, totally divorced from life as we know it.

Here is an example:

As I understand the technology of Star Trek, I cannot for the life of me fathom what happened to the human sense of making fun of other people. Let's imagine one of these meeting they show, with the table surrounded by the various officers, captain at the head. Surely, we might expect someone to transport a whoopee cushion to someone's chair as he/she sat down, with the whole table erupting in laughter as the person sits down to the sound of pffffffffffttttt!". This is human nature.

No, we can't have that. Everybody on Star Trek is serious. Frighteningly serious. The humor they do have makes news anchor humor seem like ROFL humor.

The real medical world contains all of the silly, stupid, offbase humor that goes on everywhere else. We know when to be serious, but we know how to have fun, too.