Reviewing Movies

At time of writing I am watching seasons 3 and 4 of this show’s 15 year run. It survived that long because it enjoyed consistently good writing, directing and acting along with realistic portrayals, cutting edge medicine, and expert advisors.

I am not qualified to comment on the accuracy of the medical procedures on view or the language used to describe them. What is made amply clear is why no doctor should treat a family member and that doctor’s make lousy patients. Having a doctor around when a family member is being treated is a nightmare.

The hierarchical structure of a hospital becomes amply clear each profession jealously protecting its turf. In an era when superbugs are becoming resistant to treatment by any antibiotic the importance of lowly cleaning staff is coming to the fore. One staff member who does not wash between patients or after eating or using the bathroom can do irreparable harm. Don’t know that I’ll ever understand the differences between attending physicians, residents, interns, physicians assistants, and plain old doctors. What I have caught is the competition between various fields of medicine in particular that between surgeons and medical doctors though at times I’d have difficulty were I a patient discerning the subtle differences between treating a condition by operating or the use of drugs with all their attendant side-effects. For an outsider there’s a bewildering protocol surrounding what procedures a nurse can do vs a doctor and what privileges such as the writing of scripts though inside the hospital nurses dispense medicines on a doctor’s orders. What is very apparent is the importance of nurses and the degree to which doctors treat them dismissively. What can one say for example is the difference between a nurse who has seen a procedure performed daily for 25 years and an intern about to perform it for the first time and needs coaching by that nurse.

I’ll never understand the wisdom of having doctors in training attempt to work long sleep-deprived shifts and even double shifts. If we recognize the importance of a long-haul trucker keeping a log that documents the amount of sleep that is mandatory he get why is it not important that someone making life or death decisions do the same. Nepotism it would seem is not frowned upon though having two family members in the same department must lead to short-staffing if a family emergency ensues. As in good police procedurals one of the strengths of this show was the fact that these doctors and nurses had lives outside their work hours, they were three-dimensional characters.

Mark Greene’s visit to his family home in California returns him to the room he grew up in, or at least the furniture that was moved from base to base as his navy father got transferred from assignment to assignment. Given a life lived at sea and a taciturn nature his father is not an active presence in his life. It therefore comes as a shock to him that his father gave up a chance at promotion to admiral for his sake and kept that fact secret all those years. Doug Ross by contrast is forced to pick up the pieces after his dilettante roving gambler father dies in a car accident taking with him a girl friend without a name and the family man Mexican American driver of the other car.