Anonymous Doctor

I should probably give myself a pass on blogging the day before intern year begins. Instead, I'll resort to an easy blogger's trick: ranting about something I watched on TV. I shouldn't watch medical shows. I know too much. It's just too frustrating to watch the incompetence of television medicine. I thought they have doctors consult on these things, but I guess they either ignore them, or the doctors that get these gigs are the worst doctors in the world.

There's a new show on the USA Network called Royal Pains. It starts Mark Feuerstein as a concierge doctor in the Hamptons. I don't know any concierge doctors, but I'm pretty sure it's a growth industry, especially if we nationalize health care. Rich people pay a doctor to be on personal call and come to their house to treat them. So the main case in the episode I saw was a high school kid who suddenly gets paralyzed and a whole cascade of catastrophic symptoms. And they run all sorts of tests (with hospital equipment that has somehow found its way into the rich person's house) and find nothing, until the guy's sister mentions the guy fell in the grass the other day-- and-- aha!-- the doctor looks in his ear, finds a tick-- and instantly the kid comes back to life and all of his symptoms go away. This is preposterous on so many levels. It's just not the way illness happens, or gets resolved, and not the way causes are discovered, and not anything remotely resembling a responsible depiction of reality.

Argh.