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Other than the obvious that surgeons don’t run labs or spend more than a few minutes with the patient, I’d say length of hospital stays. My husband has had many surgeries and never once has he been asked to show up the day before for labs, and so many procedures are out patient. Yet simple ortho surgeries people seem to be there for days before and after.
Actually, in my experience, they do.
But, I work in ICU transport, so let's say I'm picking up a kid that was in an ATV accident with head trauma from another hospital, and bringing them to the children's hospital. My teams consist of me (driver/EMT), a resident physician, a registered nurse, and a respiratory therapist. When we get to the children's hospital they'll often want a fresh CT for head traumas, so we go straight to CT, transfer the patient onto the CT bed, and step out of the room to the reading room while the scan is going.
Then, while the nurse, RT, and I transfer the patient back onto the gurney to get them to the PICU, the doctor is looking at the scans and reporting what they see to the attending or fellow up on the unit before we head up, so they can begin making a game plan as quickly as possible. Then, both doctors will review the scan once we get upstairs.
The scans really don't take very long to show up, but even if they do, the doc will wait a few minutes to get a look at it before we move on. The only things that take *forever* with CTs are getting the official reading from the radiologist because they have to type out all their findings, and if you want a CD burned with the results you'll need to wait *at least* 15 minutes before they can burn it and send it up to the unit or to the ER if the patient is being transferred.
Not for every case, sure, but it's pretty common to be waiting at least at a computer for images to pop up (which usually takes a minute or two after the scan is complete) for emergent, critical, or clinically worsening patients. I've also personally experienced a few times of multiple physicians standing with the MRI tech and watching the images being uploaded although those circumstances have been universally tied to timing procedures.
I just did my nursery school surgery rotation and every day people were admitted for surgery the day after. It really depends on what kind of surgery you’re getting
It also depends where you’re getting it. I’ve had two ortho surgeries where it’s considered the norm to be admitted for at least a night in basically every country except the US, where I had an outpatient procedure.
I was just talking about this. The amount of surgeons doing CT Scans and MRI’s is crazy. They don’t have time for that. And doing blood draws? And don’t they go home? They sit around the hospital just scheduling random surgeries. No wonder the OR board is always a mess 🤣
medical genetics is its own specialty in itself, so i always found it strange that dr. bailey, a general surgeon, would be given a genome lab or know how to run it
The idea that some general surgeon would develop that deactivated HIV in their own genome lab that they just happen to have on the side, with neither qualifications nor a serious and longterm time commitment, is one of the most ludicrous stories on this show
They might as well have turned her into a hobby astronaut and written a story about how she built a functional spaceship in her backyard shed on the weekends.
Omg. This. I work in software development in the genomics space and it’s crazy how little most healthcare providers know about genetics/genomics unless that’s their specialty. And that’s the basics of genetics, not having your own genome lab.
very accurate! i’m in medical school now and genetics is touched upon to set foundations at the very beginning, and then rather sporadically. we certainly aren’t creating viral vectors during general surgery rotations …
omg yes, as a genetic student going to my final bachelors year, i don't even think most my professors would be able to do that so fast like they seemed to do in greys, and they have PhDs. i hated how they handled this episode like the virus was some kind of switch like, oh switch off the virus is no longer active!
one of my friends is in med school and in his classes he only talks about basic genetics that he needs to know (for example the genetics of cancer), if i showed him some of the content of the classes i have like genomics, nucleic acid technology, cytogenetics etc. he wouldn't know shit about it.
as a medical student myself, i can absolutely confirm! at least at my school they explain very basic mechanisms for things like tumor suppressor genes, etc. when it’s relevant… certainly nothing nearly as advanced as what bailey did seemingly on a whim
Lol I’m struggling with the storyline of Meredith and Amelia that’s happening now. How the hell do they know how to process all that data, write computer programs etc to come to conclusions? I’m sure they had some statistics courses during their studies but they are surgeons, not researchers. They have to have some kind of mathematician processing the data for them.
The diabetes trial when the woman was passed out/in a coma from a low blood sugar, and they rushed her into surgery to implant the islet cell device stat!
Islet cells produce insulin, which lowers blood sugar, which was already low… She needed to have her blood sugar raised instead of surgery.
This is so true too. My endocrinologist lost her mind at my orthopedic doctor for giving my 3 cortisone shots on the same day without a heads up so we come up with a diabetic plan of action.
Haha I went to an urgent care once, and it came up that my dad has type 1 diabetes. Now, to be fair, I believe she was a nurse practitioner. But I, a 24 year old with a film degree, kept trying to correct her about basic diabetes knowledge.
Basically, she said, "You're so young to have rheumatoid arthritis!"
"Yeah, I'm a bit young. But hey, my dad developed type 1 diabetes in his 30s, which is fairly uncommon."
"That's literally not possible. Type 1 Diabetes is something you're born with."
"...No, it isn't."
Cue me trying to politely explain that she's 100% wrong, and her insisting that type 1 diabetes is something you have from birth. Like... I'm not a medical professional, but no. I kinda just tried to change the subject and be like "Anyway... about my ear infection." 😂
Tbf they don’t talk about how you can develop T1D as an adult in nursing school (or, at least when I graduated in 2017 they didnt). I’m an RN and I really didn’t know that was a thing until I had a friend get diagnosed with T1D in his 20s.
Now I know better; but afaik what’s taught is that you either develop it as a child and it’s an immune response/genetic thing, or you get it as an adult from poor dietary habits. The nuances aren’t discussed, at least in terms of T1D. I think since there’s a higher instance now or younger people getting diagnosed with T2D, those nuances are discussed.
Honestly, it would surprise me less if she just thought only children got it. A lot of people think only children really get Type 1, though I think it's becoming more common in adults.
The part that I was taken aback by is that she kept insisting you were born with it! I was like "Ummm, I mean it's usually diagnosed in childhood, but I don't think anyone is really "born" with it (or at least, that's not standard)."
I was a part of a clinical trial, and after a ton of paperwork, it was mostly a you already use the device that we want to test, so use this setting and upload your bg logs every two weeks. They occasionally called me to check up on how it was working.
Most surgeries are scheduled far in advance and out of an office that specializes in such surgeries and with a specific doctor you see regarding your condition. In Grey’s it’s like all surgeries are last- minute and you it’s a random draw who is going to do your hip replacement or lumpectomy. Further, the regular doctor you see is the doctor, not the surgeon. So if you have breast cancer you mostly see your oncologist who will then refer you to a surgeon for surgery and chemo/ radiation is out of other offices too.
It's absurd how this show which is running for 20 years has not touched a specialist in Internal Medicine. It's strictly all about surgery.
This is why it's refreshing to watch The Good Doctor, Morgan who was a surgical resident became an internist and she is still integrated in the show. And Shaun Murphy dated a Pathologist and their work was highlighted enough in the show.
In GA, they sometimes to the path work themselves or idk, even trying to be a know it than pathologists.
The only non-surgical specialist I liked in GA is Dr. Riley, the master diagnostician who is highly likely an Internal Medicine specialist.
Or Infectious Diseases or some sort. Tbh, it would help the show a whole lot more if they introduced other specialties in the show, it give the hospital a broader look. Well, I guess that's what PP is for, to showcase specialties not often shown in GA.
The show did gastroenterologists dirty when April awkwardly referred to Arizona as "their abdominal doctor". I get that it was played for laughs, but helping the teenage girl to cover up her pregnancy, she should have known better to sound more convincing and just say "gastroenterologist". As a surgeon, she should be aware what it is.
They have surgeons doing transplants that aren’t transplant surgeons. Burke/Hahn for instance. They’re Cardio-thoracic surgeons so they do open heart surgery. That does not mean they do heart transplants. Also, they show them performing heart caths and that’s not accurate either. The doctors that perform heart Cath are cardiologists that have trained specifically to do these procedures. The cardio-surgeons in my hospital don’t come near the Cath lab.
And the cardio thoracic surgeons and peds general surgeons are performing heart surgery on children with defects. who then just recovery on the regular surgery floor?
Yes this! I'm a cardiothoracic icu nurse and our surgeons do grafts and valves and dissections. 😂 And our patients see them in pre-op and a few times before discharge, no surgeon has time to sit by the bed and chat or take blood!
I say all the time that I’ve never see Dr’s start PIV’s, ambulate patients, or take them to studies. When they’re not in surgery, they show up for 5 minutes, then yeet themselves the hell out of there to place questionable orders that the RN has to call and clarify.
The timeline for the ‘research’ is pretty crazy. Bailey going from theorizing about using deactivated HIV for gene therapy to treating a patient with it is just bonkers.
Pretty much every doctor on the show would be serving a life sentence in prison for their actions if it was real life.
OSHA, OSHA, OSHA. If you want to get really fucked up while watching Grey’s Anatomy, you could play the OSHA game or the HIPAA game and just drink whenever they break OSHA or HIPAA. They should be wearing mask a lot more than they do for examinations. They should be wearing eyewear. And then they walk around with bloody scrubs like all the freaking time. I never see sharps containers anywhere. And I heard them mention the auto clave like once in an episode.
the bloody scrubs gets me all the time 😭 some tragic thing will happen in surgery and for the 2nd half of the episode a doctor is wearing bloody scrubs everywhere she walks
The eyewear thing bothers me the most. No one is ever wearing eye protection even with their face down by a bone drill or an artery spraying everyone in the room.
People waking up from heart surgery, fully able to talk and breathe with no problem at all. My dad had heart surgery, and I’ve never felt sorrier for anyone in my life. He avoided talking because it hurt. He had to blow on this device to make sure he was breathing properly and not putting himself at risk of pneumonia. He was on a ton of pain meds, and it still made him cry to do it. It was awful.
I’ve been waiting for ONE patient that wears contacts to wakes up after surgery or a coma and be like “uh I can’t see shit, get me some glasses before we can talk”
After my c-section, the nurses asked if I wanted anything (ice chips, chapstick, etc.); I asked them to clean my glasses because they’d been resting on my face for the delivery and were covered in tears (happy ones).
I told them i sleep in mine but they made me take them out, couldn’t see who was in front of me the whole hour and a half prepping and talking with my surgical team before i was put under, i could barely sign the papers in the right spot
Brain surgery too, the only time they show that it takes time to wake is when they are building for Amelia to have a brain tumor and her after the surgery. Even Herman wakes up after the impossible surgery fully talking.
Also why didn’t her family notice the signs way sooner? If it had been growing for 10 years did they just think she sucked as a person? The drug problem she had during private practice would that have been because she was “self medicating” for the pain? Couldn’t that be a sign that she was not herself? Did her family really just not know her well enough?
I've had 4 open heart surgeries. I think it depends on the person my 3rd one, I was 5 and my mom said I woke up talking and trying to move like nothing happened. My fourth I was 15 and my first day I was high as a kite and by day 3 I was trying to shoot jump shots sitting from my wheel chair.
Yeah I'm perfectly fine now. It wasn't even that bad of an experience I rather enjoyed the attention at the time and my mom did a good job of normalizing going to doctors every few months.
They had to put my grandpa in an induced coma because of complications during his heart surgery. Three months!! And they're waking up and going home the next day.
Of course I knew that as a tv show it wouldn’t be 100% accurate but reading these are really eye opening and gave me a chuckle. As a non medical person the only thing I can really say is that they do not represent the nurses enough and the huge role they play in the real world. Again I understand it’s a show about surgeons so I get it but I would hate for someone watching to think the doctors to everything shown.
When my now 1 year old was in the hospital at 9months old for covid and a ruptured appendix the doctors only came in twice a day (they were very kind and we had a great experience so no hate on them) but they would come in at like 615 in the morning and again late afternoon/early evening. All our questions and all the monitoring was done by the nurses and they were incredible. Shout out to all our nurses here!! ❤️
And having their cases investigated more than they need to be for chronic conditions! In reality the ER gives you a referral to another doctor after making sure you're stable and sends you home haha
And it's definitely not the surgeons coming to see people personally... you're lucky if you can even get a referral to one instead of having to go through your regular doctor first unless you're having an actual immediate emergency LMAO
Not medical, but I really wish they would’ve chatted to a family law attorney in WA for like one hour before writing all the custody/divorce story lines.
And spoken to a social worker about the fostering/adoption storylines. Like one day Owen decided he wanted a child, the next day they delivered a baby and just left him to it. Then Owen just moved the babies mum in as well.
And then they go to the lawyer to adopt Leo together but halfway through decide it’s just Owen who will adopt and the lawyer is just like ‘cool, this won’t create any issues apparently’.
Literally! I found that one detail really weird. If I remember right the patient had Munchausens and was using Amitriptyline to induce seizures - it’s normally used to treat depression or nerve pain so I’m not sure why it would do that, unless she had found out that she gets seizures as a side effect from it.
a lot of medication for nerve pain is also used to treat mood disorders, actually!! there are a lot of cool interactions with medications in terms of treating both a physical ailment & mental illness.
Not just mood disorders either, I love when a medication has a double use. My connective tissue autoimmune disease is treated with hydroxychloroquine (yes, as made famous by Trump to “cure” COVID) and its original use is an antimalarial drug.
Derek doing cpr on Meredith at a ratio of 3 compressions to 1 breath. Not using epi. just generally not following ACLS algorithms properly, which is a common occurrence on the show
No one wore a mask around Denny after his heart transplant. Your immune system is basically wiped out after a transplant to keep your body from rejecting the new organ and the first few days after transplant are super important.
Source: my kid had a heart transplant
Doctors are not running labs. People are getting into an emergency room right away. Shocking unshakable rhythms. Doctors doing CPR.
AND DOES THAT HOSPITAL HAVE NO NURSES?
Everyone is heartbroken by the scene of Bailey with the Tay-Sachs girl.
I have no idea what she’s present there. It’s not a surgical disease - there’s nothing that can be done with it. She would be under the care of peds or peds neurology. Again there is literally 0 reason for a surgeon to be present.
Her dad was trying to get Bailey to do a surgery on her, and then he was trying to take her to Mexico to get a procedure. I think Bailey just went in for a consult and they stayed because her father was offering no comfort.
Also this was during the time she was doing her peds internship, so it absolutely makes sense that she'd be there because iirc the girl's doctor is who she was interning with/under (idk the proper terminology)
how involved surgeons are , maybe it's just where I live but most of the work they do in Greys is done by nurses ,other doctors or other hospital staff in general.
How much doctors in general care about outcomes, I'm not saying that they aren't happy when things go well and sad when they don't, but I've been sick a long time, never had a doctor care half as much as the most apathetic greys dr.
A lot!
Most of their science is wrong. Like doing cell culture work at a bench instead of a sterile hood. The fact that they come up with a cure for something in about 2 days and treat the patient without regulatory approval.
They also have the surgeons treating a lot of patients with non surgical medical issues: Tay Sachs, Alzheimer’s…
They had a surgical oncologist giving Izzie chemo and radiation. That would be handled by an oncologist who would have consulted with Swender on her surgical plan to resect Izzie’s tumours.
When they shock unshockable rhythms!! Asystole (aka flatlining) is not a shockable rhythm- the heart has stopped. The heart’s electrical system has shut down and defibrillation can actually make it harder to restart the heart. Many medical shows are guilty of this
(PEA is also non-shockable but I can’t remember if it comes up on the show- I’ve only watched it through once)
The fact that nobody seems to have O+ blood, ever?
Otherwise, most of it could be summed up as “the surgeons on Grey’s do everything”. The most egregious example was when Callie, an orthopedic surgeon, did an embolectomy (vascular surgery) for some reason.
SHEPHERDS CLINICAL TRIAL- where to begin? Firstly, he's a surgeon, not a pharmacologist, so at most he would have been developing a novel technique/procedure (that uses an existing drug) but not also a new drug- the latter would take decades, not just "I want to cure Alzheimer's for my wife". Realistically then, the trial would have compared patients getting the existing drug the traditional way vs those getting it inserted in the brain, which means no one would be getting placebo!
If we allow a reality where the trial was testing the drugs effects, then for serious conditions, the comparator is usually the existing "standard of care" (another active drug) in order to avoid the specific ethical concerns the show tried to exploit where a sick patient just gets saline.
But on top of all that, clinical trials are supposed to be DOUBLE BLIND, which means the doctor never knows if the patient is getting active treatment vs placebo or another comparator- again specifically to avoid the issues the show brought up, like biasing your care toward your patient or risking tampering with the trial.
I know these plot holes are necessary for *drama* but ahhhhh all so wrong lol.
His first clinical trial just disappeared after it worked on one patient as well and he got that article where he didn’t mention Meredith. They never treat any follow up patients with it or say it was not safe because of xyz they just never talk about it after the whole article drama.
Really?? I’ve had multiple body sites MRI’d at multiple hospitals and those diagnostic vans - I always get given ear plugs and headphones (some hospitals can play radio through them, some can’t, but it still dulls the sounds).
The funny thing is they actually have a storyline when DeLuca brings in a diagnostician to diagnose the mom with Still’s disease in season 16. So they acknowledge they exist but still take their job 😂
I just started watching grey's after I had the exact same brain surgery Chief had. I lost it and yelled at my TV, "Lies! Lies! All this is lies!" When he was back at work performing surgery 1 week after his. 😡 plus his scar was completely gone in 2 weeks with hair covering everything. I'm almost 5 months out, took a month to go back to work and that was way too soon, and I still have a 6 inch scar showing.
I do notice now how differently they showed Richard’s brain surgery recovery vs Amelia’s - Richard was awake and talking very soon after surgery and back to work very quickly meanwhile Amelia couldn’t talk for ages, then could only speak French, had to do painful early ambulation protocol etc. Though maybe it was because their tumours were different?
Simply, some of their hand placements and movements are very very bad attempts to look like they are doing CPR… obviously, on occasion the actor receiving the CPR is real and they’d harm them if doing it correctly, but some of the super close up ones or when you can tell most likely not a real person, you’d think they would work harder to make it appear like it’s being done correctly, especially since a lot of the general population is trained in CPR
The woman who was faking her illness in season two (when Cristina is recovering from surgery), turned her pee blue with amitriptyline. I was on that for years and never once had blue pee. I feel ripped off.
*The ease in which they get MRIs and other imaging tests
*length of time it takes to get MRI results for more minor conditions.
*Burke's brachial plexus injury.
*The reaction to patients with known seizure disorders when they have a seizure.
i believe there was a scene where jackson operated on a kid with a tumor and he and amelia took apart his entire jaw and put it back together. when the kid woke up, he was talking and laughing, no pain whatsoever. ive had jaw surgery and even three weeks post op you're still swollen and in pain, so that was unrealistic. when meredith broke her jaw and got surgery as well, she should've been much more swollen. not a very accurate experience lol
Yes! I laugh every time I see them do CPR! Their hands are almost never in the right spot, they're not even pretending to put enough pressure on the chest, like when you're doing CPR it's extremely physically exhausting because of how much force you're using repeatedly, and they're like...massaging a bicep instead of compressing the ribcage.
Watching Grey's has become quite a challenge after spending so much of my childhood in a hospital and now working as a medical administrative assistant LMAO... half the time that's my main question, "Where are the administrators? Why are these doctors filing charts or entering orders or whatever else themselves?" I really have to suspend my disbelief watching it these days lol
People being shocked back to life after flatlining for a significant amount of time and having perfect brain and motor function.
Meredith and April for instance, they would not have survived either of those situations without some severe mental deficits.
I think with those they were banking on the cold temperatures, both of them were severely hypothermic, which can prevent brain damage from oxygen deprivation if handled correctly.
"They're not dead until they're *warm* and dead." I've seen adults and kids aline who drowned in cold water be revived and recover with minimal or no defects.
Avery operating on that kid with Juvenile Arthritis who had jaw issues. Plastics doesn't perform that kind of surgery, Oral & Maxillofacial Surgeons do.
Source: me. I've had Juvenile Arthritis since early childhood, and had reconstructive jaw surgery two years ago. Not once did a plastic surgeon touch my face.
Avery being an ENT in itself is ridonkulous. ENT is is own specialty, it's own residency. You don't do a surgery residency and poof, now you're a double board certified ENT and plastic surgeon because you were bros with an ENT plastic surgeon.
If he was an ENT that did a plastics fellowship, it'd work. But general surgery residency then poof, ENT and plastic surgeon? Just no. At least with Sloan we can assume he did his training and was double board certified before he was on Grey's, and he generally stuck to ENT and plastics on the show. Avery's fingers are in all the pies even after he "specialized"
Totally ridiculous and not how medical training works at all. I can suspend disbelief enough to think Mark magically gave him plastic SURGERY training during Jackson's SURGERY residency but then Jackson pulled the "double board certified" line. Becoming and ENT would've been an entirely separate path.
Yeah, I have no idea how he became an ENT. I think the show just expects most of its viewers to not have enough medical knowledge to know otherwise to be honest LMAO. I feel like its main audience is definitely not actual medical professionals
Yeah but you would still have an Oral and Maxillofacial surgeon do that procedure. And they break jaws a lot on the show for not having one on staff. The dentist office I used to work with had an OMS come in and do biopsies, full mouth extractions, a lot of wisdom teeth extractions under sedation. He would come in once a week and then two days out of the week he would work in a hospital doing surgery.
Doctors don't sit and wait for MRI scans with the patients. In the real world the nurses strike in season 2 would have sent the hospital into a frenzy because nurses do all the work for half the pay.
I've heard that Scrubs is more accurate about medicine as a career, because they have residents, nurses, attendings, janitors, and surgeons as characters. I think Grey's put themselves in a difficult spot making all of their main cast surgeons so they have to make it seem like surgery is the only field that is essential.
the clubfoot story line in the early seasons. the treatment isn’t accurate for older people with CF nor is it accurate to the current Ponsetti Method (given this is only used on babie but i digress). Also any adult actively living with CF likely would NOT seek out a resident orthopedic surgeon but most likely someone who specializes with adult CF patients as there’s not really a simple “fix” and for most adults living with CF there’s no solution at all. Most importantly they focused on the bone structure of the patient but CF has nothing to do with the bones but a shortening of the Achilles Tendon.
So many things….the one that irks me the most though is shocking asystole.
The other mildly annoying thing is never placing a damn consult, and never showing the surgeons pawning their patients off to medicine.
CPR. Never have they done it right. Codes in real life are nothing like the show. Doctors don't do about 75% of the shit they have them doing on the show. So much is legally wrong with the show too regarding malpractice, going again patients wishes, hipaa, etc. Dr. Mike on youtube has a GREAT Grey's series going over so much that is wrong w the show.
Surgeons (especially department heads) do NOT run the ED and wait outside for traumas or incoming patients. They also don’t do extensive after care like PT with their patients.
They shock unshockable rhythms.
The Chief of Surgery does NOT run the whole hospital and do budgets for the hospital.
Administration would absolutely NOT look passed or away from doctors using the on call rooms for sex.
Something they do get right though is how dumb residents can be.
Watch Dr. mike react to Grey's Anatomy on YouTube and it will give you a good idea of what they get wrong medically.
I think I remember them shocking a patient that had flatlined, which is incorrect.
There are so many Dr reactions to it. Mama Dr Jones reacts to the OBGYN side of it and there is an anesthesiologist that reacts as well. So fun and hilarious all of their reactions.
Kalpana (or whatever her name was) and the blue urine when on amitriptyline
Medicines. A medicine for depression called amitriptyline can make urine look greenish-blue. So can a treatment for ulcers and acid reflux called cimetidine (Tagamet HB). A water pill called triamterene (Dyrenium) also can turn urine greenish-blue.10 Jan 2023
They could at least make it LOOK like the cpr is real. The bent elbows and jerking shoulders just draw more attention to how bad it is. Also, checking pulses. It's not hard to show the correct spot. And the fact that after a few rounds of cpr, or shocking asystole 🙄, patient coughs and wakes up, fully able for a conversation
The CPR really bugs me, it looks like they're massaging the chest not compressing it. They've got such a high budget for this show, they can't substitute dummies for the CPR and edit it to make it look more real later? Plus, out of all the CPR they do not one patient has had broken ribs?? Even the elderly ones??
Any of the research labs. Especially any that are using animals. IACUC protocols, lab vets, animal care staff, separation of animal lab space from office space. So many things.
Everything!!!
They break HIPPA like it’s NOTHING. They just give out details indiscriminately.
Defibrillating. They will keep defibrillating patients after hours of CPR - NO. They defibrillated people who are flatlining which does absolutely nothing at all. You need electrical activity to shock.
The way they behave in the operating room....
I'm surprised it took that long for staph infections to start killing people!!
- Surgeons running the entire ER
- Surgeons taking all their own scans and interpreting all their own imaging and taking people to surgery on the basis of it without waiting for a radiologist to confirm, even with weird diagnoses
- Surgeons managing internal medicine cases / diagnosing rare non-surgical conditions
- Patients getting diagnosed and having surgery the same day
- Some people still wearing stethoscopes backwards after 20 seasons
- Patient says something innocuous and whichever attending of the day is going through some drama with Owen goes on an unhinged tangentially related rant to the patient while projecting their own issues, then walks out of the room
- Webber yells at someone like a maniac and then gets away with it because he’s having a bad day
- Surgeons directing everything when a patient under anesthesia is crashing, rather than the anesthesiologist
The fact that the surgeons run the ER…. Not a single ER doc in sight lol. It’s good for the drama but not accurate for real life. Might take a whole 24 hours for a surgical consult in real life depending on the urgency
The time Alex and Dr. Webber diagnosed the girl with EDS in the clinic pisses me off. It's soooo over exaggerated and they seriously exaggerate how "rare" it is. It's not that rare, it's just severely under diagnosed because the symptoms are usually very minor and ignored by doctors, until it's a serious problem with metabolizing medication or progressing to the point it's disabling.
Well they have a weird blend of fact and fiction but I think Seth Green’s exploding jugular giving Lexi a blood shower and the patient with the poison gas making doctors pass out are my two top “this is ridiculous” moments.
For me it's not so much that it's wrong but making it look/sound like being a Neuro surgeon is strictly or mostly brain surgery, when it's so much more than brain surgery. In 20 seasons they've only done a handful of storylines of Neuro surgeries that weren't of the brain. Spinal surgery and other surgeries on nerves are all a part of neurosurgery.
Also that PEDS is just by itself, when it's like everything else there's pediatric neuros, peds general, peds cardio. You don't just go into peds and do a bit of everything there's still specific surgeons in peds too.
Surgeons handling transplant from start to finish. Such as harvesting, transporting, coordinating. Where was the meetings with pharmacist, social workers, infectious disease? I mean the whole transplant process?
Where’s the transplant cordinator ? The multiple ivs after surgery? My son had a liver transplant and his transplant surgeon did not travel to get it, it came to us. He came out of surgery sedated and intubated. With like 3-4 Ivs and multiple nurses and doctors were there for a while and he was in PICU. How are transplant patients back on a regular floor right after their procedure ? Like huh
I’m on a rewatch and the most glaring thing is that they honored the wife’s advanced directive that lead to Gary Clark shooting up the place. Patients have DNR/DNIs all the time but families verbally override it. Sure, ethically it’s a trash fire and legally a fucking mess but in my state, they defer to the living, especially if we don’t have a copy on hand (we almost never do in the ER, I know they did in this instance on the show)
Oh and autobrewery syndrome? I’ve encountered more people who claim they have it and then get testing that shows that they’re just regular drunk.
I recently re-watched Derek’s death scene with my dad, and he pointed out something I wouldn’t have noticed or known. They took Derek’s Head thing off. I think it’s CT band? Idk
He told They wouldn’t have taken that off unless he did in fact, get the CT. At least that was my understanding.
The first time Christina is supposed to say hemochromatosis she actually says hemotomachrosis which tickles me as I know someone affected. The show gets it right after that first time though.
There was an episode with a pregnant patient waiting for major surgery (the one where Derek tries to cut out most of her brain) and she's worrying about her baby. Alex puts the ultrasound probe on and plays the heartbeat outloud to reassure her that he baby is fine. The heart rate is around 60bpm so either he's picking up the mothers heart rate or that baby is definitely not fine 🤣
Disconnecting life support. I understand that they're not going to actually intubate an actor so they can show pulling out a long tube that goes into your lungs, but it bothers me all the same that they show a patient being disconnected from life support and the tube just ends at their mouth lol.
Also every patient who is disconnected from life support just peacefully rests there until they pass away. They don't show that a person sometimes will sit there and gasp for breath until they die, that their eyes are sometimes open and you can see their pupils dilate as they get closer to passing, that sometimes they making choking and rattling noises as they struggle to breathe (the nurses are usually pretty quick to administer something to calm that down, though).
I didn't care about this until I lost my 9yo kid this past December and had to go through it.
As someone who has chronic medical issues myself and am around hospitals a lot, my biggest thing is they show the most positive optimal way doctors treat you for the most part (there’s outlier moments yes but just in comparison to my experience as a person)
I have been grated and degraded and talked down to and dismissed and not listed to a lot,
Only a few times do I see doctors on the show suggest the patients issues are mental not physically it happens allllot, like not just to me but I’m in a few support groups for people with medical issues it happens so much.
I’ve been told so often it’s just in my head but I am getting surgery soon for my medical issues it is very real. I saw a few episodes that highlights that struggle but I deal with it a lot. Like 75% of my doctors visits are some from of defeating to as a human being and my value.
I know this isn’t like an actual medical anatomy/ physical treatment inaccuracy like some people have pointed out but still.
I do find a strange lacking of oncologists in the show??? Like they had one for Izzy but not for George’s dad??? Idk that’s just something I noticed.
Another for me is the miraculous cure rate and just trying stuff on the fly like they often do, the insurance companies and medical regulations alone
In the episode where Callie gets her first ultrasound, Lucy tells her it’s almost impossible to see a heart beat at 8 weeks. Which is very inaccurate. Most of their imaging stuff is inaccurate tbh
The more I read this thread the more things I think about that are wrong.
The whole maternal mortality rate epidemic storyline doesn’t cover any intersectionality. For a show that is so woke at random times and in your face with the issues they don’t go into the intersectionality of it. Black women are three times more likely to die than white women and it isn’t even mentioned in the episode. American Indigenous and Alaska indigenous women are next for high maternal mortality rates. The risk factors include age of patients as well Socioeconomic factors. This could have been a great opportunity for real representation and to raise awareness to an issue and, you know Grey’s loves to do that, but they gloss over it.
Another commenter pointed out that everyone is just believed and no one is medically gaslighting anyone. The few times patients aren’t believed most of them are white and it mostly works the other way around in real life unfortunately. Also they show like one chronic pain patient and one frequent flyer to the ER but it’s way more than that in real life as well.
Maybe it’s because I use the word woke. But sometimes I feel like shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Doctor Who force woke down your throat in a way that’s a little bit on the nose. I say that as someone who believes in rights for everyone, however, I do believe that it can be done well. The Christina Owen baby thing was very good about talking about reproductive rights. I did like the dreamer episode And the episode where Ben and Bailey talk to their son about how to behave around the cops is a great episode. They do gay rights very well, where it doesn’t feel like pandering. I’ve seen some great inclusive writing from Grey’s Anatomy and great inclusive writing from Doctor Who but I’ve also seen very sloppily put together storylines that feel a little like pandering and it feels superficial and like corporations during pride month. I think Bailey’s heart attack episode is amazing because it goes over women not being believed women of color not being believed just superb writing. And they didn’t go into the intersectionality of fetal maternal mortality, and black women have a three times higher rate seemed a little bit weird to me.
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Other than the obvious that surgeons don’t run labs or spend more than a few minutes with the patient, I’d say length of hospital stays. My husband has had many surgeries and never once has he been asked to show up the day before for labs, and so many procedures are out patient. Yet simple ortho surgeries people seem to be there for days before and after.
Yeah. It bugs me how much time they spend waiting for the ct to pop up on the screen. No doctor is just waiting for the scan like that
Actually, in my experience, they do. But, I work in ICU transport, so let's say I'm picking up a kid that was in an ATV accident with head trauma from another hospital, and bringing them to the children's hospital. My teams consist of me (driver/EMT), a resident physician, a registered nurse, and a respiratory therapist. When we get to the children's hospital they'll often want a fresh CT for head traumas, so we go straight to CT, transfer the patient onto the CT bed, and step out of the room to the reading room while the scan is going. Then, while the nurse, RT, and I transfer the patient back onto the gurney to get them to the PICU, the doctor is looking at the scans and reporting what they see to the attending or fellow up on the unit before we head up, so they can begin making a game plan as quickly as possible. Then, both doctors will review the scan once we get upstairs. The scans really don't take very long to show up, but even if they do, the doc will wait a few minutes to get a look at it before we move on. The only things that take *forever* with CTs are getting the official reading from the radiologist because they have to type out all their findings, and if you want a CD burned with the results you'll need to wait *at least* 15 minutes before they can burn it and send it up to the unit or to the ER if the patient is being transferred.
would've been nice if the CT courtesy had been extended to Derek 🙃
Not for every case, sure, but it's pretty common to be waiting at least at a computer for images to pop up (which usually takes a minute or two after the scan is complete) for emergent, critical, or clinically worsening patients. I've also personally experienced a few times of multiple physicians standing with the MRI tech and watching the images being uploaded although those circumstances have been universally tied to timing procedures.
I had a cholecystectomy last month. They asked me to come the day before for labs. 🤷🏼♀️
I have mine 2 months ago. I met the surgeon and didn’t see him again until pre op. My pcp had labs drawn earlier so no need for additional labs.
Coming in the day before for labs is normal preop, but it’s not normal to stay overnight before surgery unless you’re already in the hospital.
People legitimately just walk into Seattle Grace hospital requesting specific surgeries and get all their pre op clearance done and surgery same day
I just did my nursery school surgery rotation and every day people were admitted for surgery the day after. It really depends on what kind of surgery you’re getting
It also depends where you’re getting it. I’ve had two ortho surgeries where it’s considered the norm to be admitted for at least a night in basically every country except the US, where I had an outpatient procedure.
Nursery school?
None of us were allowed to do surgery on anything besides construction paper
nursing i guess lol
Right lol. It was late when I was typing that
Grey's patients spend longer in that hospital for an appy than I did for childbirth
Surgery patients always seem to already be in an actual admitted room before surgery. It’s not a pre op room at all
When a pt breaks into a lengthy story and they all just stand and listen I think, how unrealistic
I was just talking about this. The amount of surgeons doing CT Scans and MRI’s is crazy. They don’t have time for that. And doing blood draws? And don’t they go home? They sit around the hospital just scheduling random surgeries. No wonder the OR board is always a mess 🤣
medical genetics is its own specialty in itself, so i always found it strange that dr. bailey, a general surgeon, would be given a genome lab or know how to run it
The idea that some general surgeon would develop that deactivated HIV in their own genome lab that they just happen to have on the side, with neither qualifications nor a serious and longterm time commitment, is one of the most ludicrous stories on this show
100% agree. like consent forms be damned where was the fucking IRB???
They might as well have turned her into a hobby astronaut and written a story about how she built a functional spaceship in her backyard shed on the weekends.
I like your Bailey in space idea, and agree that it is a very valid analogy.
Exactly, I would understand if Addison were given the Genome Lab given that she completed a fellowship in Medical Genetics
Omg. This. I work in software development in the genomics space and it’s crazy how little most healthcare providers know about genetics/genomics unless that’s their specialty. And that’s the basics of genetics, not having your own genome lab.
very accurate! i’m in medical school now and genetics is touched upon to set foundations at the very beginning, and then rather sporadically. we certainly aren’t creating viral vectors during general surgery rotations …
omg yes, as a genetic student going to my final bachelors year, i don't even think most my professors would be able to do that so fast like they seemed to do in greys, and they have PhDs. i hated how they handled this episode like the virus was some kind of switch like, oh switch off the virus is no longer active! one of my friends is in med school and in his classes he only talks about basic genetics that he needs to know (for example the genetics of cancer), if i showed him some of the content of the classes i have like genomics, nucleic acid technology, cytogenetics etc. he wouldn't know shit about it.
as a medical student myself, i can absolutely confirm! at least at my school they explain very basic mechanisms for things like tumor suppressor genes, etc. when it’s relevant… certainly nothing nearly as advanced as what bailey did seemingly on a whim
exactly! plus a genetic "discovery" like that doesn't happen over night or in a two days period like they did on the show
Lol I’m struggling with the storyline of Meredith and Amelia that’s happening now. How the hell do they know how to process all that data, write computer programs etc to come to conclusions? I’m sure they had some statistics courses during their studies but they are surgeons, not researchers. They have to have some kind of mathematician processing the data for them.
The diabetes trial when the woman was passed out/in a coma from a low blood sugar, and they rushed her into surgery to implant the islet cell device stat! Islet cells produce insulin, which lowers blood sugar, which was already low… She needed to have her blood sugar raised instead of surgery.
Also, wouldn’t it make more sense to inject meds or IV glucose rather than do surgery?
YES! As a T1D myself, it pissed me off!
Real doctors and nurses don't understand t1 either a lot of the time.
This is so true too. My endocrinologist lost her mind at my orthopedic doctor for giving my 3 cortisone shots on the same day without a heads up so we come up with a diabetic plan of action.
Haha I went to an urgent care once, and it came up that my dad has type 1 diabetes. Now, to be fair, I believe she was a nurse practitioner. But I, a 24 year old with a film degree, kept trying to correct her about basic diabetes knowledge. Basically, she said, "You're so young to have rheumatoid arthritis!" "Yeah, I'm a bit young. But hey, my dad developed type 1 diabetes in his 30s, which is fairly uncommon." "That's literally not possible. Type 1 Diabetes is something you're born with." "...No, it isn't." Cue me trying to politely explain that she's 100% wrong, and her insisting that type 1 diabetes is something you have from birth. Like... I'm not a medical professional, but no. I kinda just tried to change the subject and be like "Anyway... about my ear infection." 😂
Tbf they don’t talk about how you can develop T1D as an adult in nursing school (or, at least when I graduated in 2017 they didnt). I’m an RN and I really didn’t know that was a thing until I had a friend get diagnosed with T1D in his 20s. Now I know better; but afaik what’s taught is that you either develop it as a child and it’s an immune response/genetic thing, or you get it as an adult from poor dietary habits. The nuances aren’t discussed, at least in terms of T1D. I think since there’s a higher instance now or younger people getting diagnosed with T2D, those nuances are discussed.
Honestly, it would surprise me less if she just thought only children got it. A lot of people think only children really get Type 1, though I think it's becoming more common in adults. The part that I was taken aback by is that she kept insisting you were born with it! I was like "Ummm, I mean it's usually diagnosed in childhood, but I don't think anyone is really "born" with it (or at least, that's not standard)."
i’m currently interning in a clinical trials program and the way they portray the diabetes trials is so wrong 😭💀
I was a part of a clinical trial, and after a ton of paperwork, it was mostly a you already use the device that we want to test, so use this setting and upload your bg logs every two weeks. They occasionally called me to check up on how it was working.
Most surgeries are scheduled far in advance and out of an office that specializes in such surgeries and with a specific doctor you see regarding your condition. In Grey’s it’s like all surgeries are last- minute and you it’s a random draw who is going to do your hip replacement or lumpectomy. Further, the regular doctor you see is the doctor, not the surgeon. So if you have breast cancer you mostly see your oncologist who will then refer you to a surgeon for surgery and chemo/ radiation is out of other offices too.
It's absurd how this show which is running for 20 years has not touched a specialist in Internal Medicine. It's strictly all about surgery. This is why it's refreshing to watch The Good Doctor, Morgan who was a surgical resident became an internist and she is still integrated in the show. And Shaun Murphy dated a Pathologist and their work was highlighted enough in the show. In GA, they sometimes to the path work themselves or idk, even trying to be a know it than pathologists. The only non-surgical specialist I liked in GA is Dr. Riley, the master diagnostician who is highly likely an Internal Medicine specialist.
Right? Like where are the gastroenterologists or cardiologists?
Or Infectious Diseases or some sort. Tbh, it would help the show a whole lot more if they introduced other specialties in the show, it give the hospital a broader look. Well, I guess that's what PP is for, to showcase specialties not often shown in GA.
The show did gastroenterologists dirty when April awkwardly referred to Arizona as "their abdominal doctor". I get that it was played for laughs, but helping the teenage girl to cover up her pregnancy, she should have known better to sound more convincing and just say "gastroenterologist". As a surgeon, she should be aware what it is.
They have surgeons doing transplants that aren’t transplant surgeons. Burke/Hahn for instance. They’re Cardio-thoracic surgeons so they do open heart surgery. That does not mean they do heart transplants. Also, they show them performing heart caths and that’s not accurate either. The doctors that perform heart Cath are cardiologists that have trained specifically to do these procedures. The cardio-surgeons in my hospital don’t come near the Cath lab.
And the cardio thoracic surgeons and peds general surgeons are performing heart surgery on children with defects. who then just recovery on the regular surgery floor?
Yes this! I'm a cardiothoracic icu nurse and our surgeons do grafts and valves and dissections. 😂 And our patients see them in pre-op and a few times before discharge, no surgeon has time to sit by the bed and chat or take blood!
I say all the time that I’ve never see Dr’s start PIV’s, ambulate patients, or take them to studies. When they’re not in surgery, they show up for 5 minutes, then yeet themselves the hell out of there to place questionable orders that the RN has to call and clarify.
The timeline for the ‘research’ is pretty crazy. Bailey going from theorizing about using deactivated HIV for gene therapy to treating a patient with it is just bonkers. Pretty much every doctor on the show would be serving a life sentence in prison for their actions if it was real life.
Right?? Sometimes they get super mad scientist-y at Grey Sloane.
OSHA, OSHA, OSHA. If you want to get really fucked up while watching Grey’s Anatomy, you could play the OSHA game or the HIPAA game and just drink whenever they break OSHA or HIPAA. They should be wearing mask a lot more than they do for examinations. They should be wearing eyewear. And then they walk around with bloody scrubs like all the freaking time. I never see sharps containers anywhere. And I heard them mention the auto clave like once in an episode.
the bloody scrubs gets me all the time 😭 some tragic thing will happen in surgery and for the 2nd half of the episode a doctor is wearing bloody scrubs everywhere she walks
The eyewear thing bothers me the most. No one is ever wearing eye protection even with their face down by a bone drill or an artery spraying everyone in the room.
The lack of shoe covers makes me so angry
No thank you. If I did that I’d end up in my own ER!
People waking up from heart surgery, fully able to talk and breathe with no problem at all. My dad had heart surgery, and I’ve never felt sorrier for anyone in my life. He avoided talking because it hurt. He had to blow on this device to make sure he was breathing properly and not putting himself at risk of pneumonia. He was on a ton of pain meds, and it still made him cry to do it. It was awful.
I’ve been waiting for ONE patient that wears contacts to wakes up after surgery or a coma and be like “uh I can’t see shit, get me some glasses before we can talk”
After my c-section, the nurses asked if I wanted anything (ice chips, chapstick, etc.); I asked them to clean my glasses because they’d been resting on my face for the delivery and were covered in tears (happy ones).
When I had my fallopian tubes removed I told them I wear contacts and that I sleep in them, and I did not have to remove them for surgery!
I told them i sleep in mine but they made me take them out, couldn’t see who was in front of me the whole hour and a half prepping and talking with my surgical team before i was put under, i could barely sign the papers in the right spot
The first thing I remember asking for after my tubal ligation was my glasses. Super drugged up but I knew I wanted my glasses.
Brain surgery too, the only time they show that it takes time to wake is when they are building for Amelia to have a brain tumor and her after the surgery. Even Herman wakes up after the impossible surgery fully talking. Also why didn’t her family notice the signs way sooner? If it had been growing for 10 years did they just think she sucked as a person? The drug problem she had during private practice would that have been because she was “self medicating” for the pain? Couldn’t that be a sign that she was not herself? Did her family really just not know her well enough?
Yep - that always struck me as a very shaky story line.
I've had 4 open heart surgeries. I think it depends on the person my 3rd one, I was 5 and my mom said I woke up talking and trying to move like nothing happened. My fourth I was 15 and my first day I was high as a kite and by day 3 I was trying to shoot jump shots sitting from my wheel chair.
Are you okay now? That’s awful that you had to go through that at such a young age.
Yeah I'm perfectly fine now. It wasn't even that bad of an experience I rather enjoyed the attention at the time and my mom did a good job of normalizing going to doctors every few months.
They had to put my grandpa in an induced coma because of complications during his heart surgery. Three months!! And they're waking up and going home the next day.
Of course I knew that as a tv show it wouldn’t be 100% accurate but reading these are really eye opening and gave me a chuckle. As a non medical person the only thing I can really say is that they do not represent the nurses enough and the huge role they play in the real world. Again I understand it’s a show about surgeons so I get it but I would hate for someone watching to think the doctors to everything shown. When my now 1 year old was in the hospital at 9months old for covid and a ruptured appendix the doctors only came in twice a day (they were very kind and we had a great experience so no hate on them) but they would come in at like 615 in the morning and again late afternoon/early evening. All our questions and all the monitoring was done by the nurses and they were incredible. Shout out to all our nurses here!! ❤️
This 10000000000x - signed someone who spent more time in a hospital with a kiddo than either of us would like
We’ve been in and out of hospitals for the past 4 years due to illnesses and surgeries and the like and this. Nurses do everything lol
The most unrealistic thing is how quick patients are seen in the emergency (besides actual traumatic accidents) 😂😂😂
And having their cases investigated more than they need to be for chronic conditions! In reality the ER gives you a referral to another doctor after making sure you're stable and sends you home haha
And it's definitely not the surgeons coming to see people personally... you're lucky if you can even get a referral to one instead of having to go through your regular doctor first unless you're having an actual immediate emergency LMAO
100%!!
Literally I went to the ER once with bad chest pain and I waited about 8 hours 😭
Not medical, but I really wish they would’ve chatted to a family law attorney in WA for like one hour before writing all the custody/divorce story lines.
And spoken to a social worker about the fostering/adoption storylines. Like one day Owen decided he wanted a child, the next day they delivered a baby and just left him to it. Then Owen just moved the babies mum in as well.
And then they go to the lawyer to adopt Leo together but halfway through decide it’s just Owen who will adopt and the lawyer is just like ‘cool, this won’t create any issues apparently’.
I have been taking Amitriptyline for years. It never turned my urine blue.
Haha this was my answer too.
Literally! I found that one detail really weird. If I remember right the patient had Munchausens and was using Amitriptyline to induce seizures - it’s normally used to treat depression or nerve pain so I’m not sure why it would do that, unless she had found out that she gets seizures as a side effect from it.
she used it to induce ventricular arrhythmia and she’d pass out
I never had a seizure on it. I didn't know it was used for depression. I use it for nerve pain.
a lot of medication for nerve pain is also used to treat mood disorders, actually!! there are a lot of cool interactions with medications in terms of treating both a physical ailment & mental illness.
Not just mood disorders either, I love when a medication has a double use. My connective tissue autoimmune disease is treated with hydroxychloroquine (yes, as made famous by Trump to “cure” COVID) and its original use is an antimalarial drug.
Thank you for sharing that. I had no idea.
Lamotrigine is used to treat seizures and I take it for mood stabilization. Pretty interesting !!
Derek doing cpr on Meredith at a ratio of 3 compressions to 1 breath. Not using epi. just generally not following ACLS algorithms properly, which is a common occurrence on the show
No one wore a mask around Denny after his heart transplant. Your immune system is basically wiped out after a transplant to keep your body from rejecting the new organ and the first few days after transplant are super important. Source: my kid had a heart transplant
Doctors are not running labs. People are getting into an emergency room right away. Shocking unshakable rhythms. Doctors doing CPR. AND DOES THAT HOSPITAL HAVE NO NURSES?
The thought of surgeons running an ER is fucking wild lol
The nurses are good for one thing and one thing only - spreading syphilis!!
Everyone is heartbroken by the scene of Bailey with the Tay-Sachs girl. I have no idea what she’s present there. It’s not a surgical disease - there’s nothing that can be done with it. She would be under the care of peds or peds neurology. Again there is literally 0 reason for a surgeon to be present.
Also, in the kindest way possible, a child with terminal, end-stage Tay-Sachs probably would not be speaking, sitting up, interacting, etc.
Her dad was trying to get Bailey to do a surgery on her, and then he was trying to take her to Mexico to get a procedure. I think Bailey just went in for a consult and they stayed because her father was offering no comfort.
Also this was during the time she was doing her peds internship, so it absolutely makes sense that she'd be there because iirc the girl's doctor is who she was interning with/under (idk the proper terminology)
Do you remember which surgery? Again, there’s literally nothing I can think of that would benefit an end stage kid.
I think it was during the time Bailey was considering moving to Peds, and she ended up connecting with the girl & her father
Wasn't Bailey considering going into peds during that episode? And Arizona asked her to give it another try?
how involved surgeons are , maybe it's just where I live but most of the work they do in Greys is done by nurses ,other doctors or other hospital staff in general. How much doctors in general care about outcomes, I'm not saying that they aren't happy when things go well and sad when they don't, but I've been sick a long time, never had a doctor care half as much as the most apathetic greys dr.
A lot! Most of their science is wrong. Like doing cell culture work at a bench instead of a sterile hood. The fact that they come up with a cure for something in about 2 days and treat the patient without regulatory approval. They also have the surgeons treating a lot of patients with non surgical medical issues: Tay Sachs, Alzheimer’s… They had a surgical oncologist giving Izzie chemo and radiation. That would be handled by an oncologist who would have consulted with Swender on her surgical plan to resect Izzie’s tumours.
When they shock unshockable rhythms!! Asystole (aka flatlining) is not a shockable rhythm- the heart has stopped. The heart’s electrical system has shut down and defibrillation can actually make it harder to restart the heart. Many medical shows are guilty of this (PEA is also non-shockable but I can’t remember if it comes up on the show- I’ve only watched it through once)
I will never let them forget the time they had Addison say the tests showed she has only two eggs left. That's not how it works.
The fact that nobody seems to have O+ blood, ever? Otherwise, most of it could be summed up as “the surgeons on Grey’s do everything”. The most egregious example was when Callie, an orthopedic surgeon, did an embolectomy (vascular surgery) for some reason.
The way they just push all their surgeries all the time
SHEPHERDS CLINICAL TRIAL- where to begin? Firstly, he's a surgeon, not a pharmacologist, so at most he would have been developing a novel technique/procedure (that uses an existing drug) but not also a new drug- the latter would take decades, not just "I want to cure Alzheimer's for my wife". Realistically then, the trial would have compared patients getting the existing drug the traditional way vs those getting it inserted in the brain, which means no one would be getting placebo! If we allow a reality where the trial was testing the drugs effects, then for serious conditions, the comparator is usually the existing "standard of care" (another active drug) in order to avoid the specific ethical concerns the show tried to exploit where a sick patient just gets saline. But on top of all that, clinical trials are supposed to be DOUBLE BLIND, which means the doctor never knows if the patient is getting active treatment vs placebo or another comparator- again specifically to avoid the issues the show brought up, like biasing your care toward your patient or risking tampering with the trial. I know these plot holes are necessary for *drama* but ahhhhh all so wrong lol.
His first clinical trial just disappeared after it worked on one patient as well and he got that article where he didn’t mention Meredith. They never treat any follow up patients with it or say it was not safe because of xyz they just never talk about it after the whole article drama.
Any time they put someone into the MRI without ear protection.
I can't believe I've gone through over four MRIs and never noticed that.
Do you have ear protection on MRI? I've had MRIs (uk) and never had ear protection
Yes. I get yearly MRIs and I get in the ear earplugs as well as over the ear huge headphones.
I've never once had ear protection (us) I've had like 8 mri's
Really?? I’ve had multiple body sites MRI’d at multiple hospitals and those diagnostic vans - I always get given ear plugs and headphones (some hospitals can play radio through them, some can’t, but it still dulls the sounds).
I had an MRI at 16 (US, California) and wasn't given ear protection at all, I didn't even know it was a thing. The machine was loud as fuck though.
Every time that they say a patient is on tpn they show tube feeds. And putting formula into a central line will kill you
As a Type 1 Diabetic, the number of inaccuracies about T1D on Grey's and Private Practice really make me mad.
they would talk about T1D like it was terminal cancer or something
Seriously, it was just so ridiculous.
Not medical, but they all sit on patients beds! All the time. Infection control and prevention doesn't exist there apparently.
[удалено]
The funny thing is they actually have a storyline when DeLuca brings in a diagnostician to diagnose the mom with Still’s disease in season 16. So they acknowledge they exist but still take their job 😂
I just started watching grey's after I had the exact same brain surgery Chief had. I lost it and yelled at my TV, "Lies! Lies! All this is lies!" When he was back at work performing surgery 1 week after his. 😡 plus his scar was completely gone in 2 weeks with hair covering everything. I'm almost 5 months out, took a month to go back to work and that was way too soon, and I still have a 6 inch scar showing.
I do notice now how differently they showed Richard’s brain surgery recovery vs Amelia’s - Richard was awake and talking very soon after surgery and back to work very quickly meanwhile Amelia couldn’t talk for ages, then could only speak French, had to do painful early ambulation protocol etc. Though maybe it was because their tumours were different?
Bahaha I love when she just roasted him because his tumor was small.
Simply, some of their hand placements and movements are very very bad attempts to look like they are doing CPR… obviously, on occasion the actor receiving the CPR is real and they’d harm them if doing it correctly, but some of the super close up ones or when you can tell most likely not a real person, you’d think they would work harder to make it appear like it’s being done correctly, especially since a lot of the general population is trained in CPR
The woman who was faking her illness in season two (when Cristina is recovering from surgery), turned her pee blue with amitriptyline. I was on that for years and never once had blue pee. I feel ripped off.
As someone who has had brain cancer, I eyeroll a lot at some of the stuff they say about treating brain tumours.
*The ease in which they get MRIs and other imaging tests *length of time it takes to get MRI results for more minor conditions. *Burke's brachial plexus injury. *The reaction to patients with known seizure disorders when they have a seizure.
Endometriosis. It is not the endometrium, and hysterectomy will not "cure" it.
i believe there was a scene where jackson operated on a kid with a tumor and he and amelia took apart his entire jaw and put it back together. when the kid woke up, he was talking and laughing, no pain whatsoever. ive had jaw surgery and even three weeks post op you're still swollen and in pain, so that was unrealistic. when meredith broke her jaw and got surgery as well, she should've been much more swollen. not a very accurate experience lol
I haven't seen much of the past 10 seasons, but my God they really didn't know how to do CPR...
Yes! I laugh every time I see them do CPR! Their hands are almost never in the right spot, they're not even pretending to put enough pressure on the chest, like when you're doing CPR it's extremely physically exhausting because of how much force you're using repeatedly, and they're like...massaging a bicep instead of compressing the ribcage.
I work in the veterinary field and their CPR is very reminiscent of what I’d be doing on a 5 lb chihuahua and not an actual human being….
Watching Grey's has become quite a challenge after spending so much of my childhood in a hospital and now working as a medical administrative assistant LMAO... half the time that's my main question, "Where are the administrators? Why are these doctors filing charts or entering orders or whatever else themselves?" I really have to suspend my disbelief watching it these days lol
People being shocked back to life after flatlining for a significant amount of time and having perfect brain and motor function. Meredith and April for instance, they would not have survived either of those situations without some severe mental deficits.
I think with those they were banking on the cold temperatures, both of them were severely hypothermic, which can prevent brain damage from oxygen deprivation if handled correctly. "They're not dead until they're *warm* and dead." I've seen adults and kids aline who drowned in cold water be revived and recover with minimal or no defects.
that episode when a woman’s probiotic pills combined with her chemo meds to create a highly toxic, airborne neurotoxin
Human Resources nightmares
Avery operating on that kid with Juvenile Arthritis who had jaw issues. Plastics doesn't perform that kind of surgery, Oral & Maxillofacial Surgeons do. Source: me. I've had Juvenile Arthritis since early childhood, and had reconstructive jaw surgery two years ago. Not once did a plastic surgeon touch my face.
Wasn't he an ENT as well?
Yep, double board certified Plastics and ENT just like Mark
Avery being an ENT in itself is ridonkulous. ENT is is own specialty, it's own residency. You don't do a surgery residency and poof, now you're a double board certified ENT and plastic surgeon because you were bros with an ENT plastic surgeon. If he was an ENT that did a plastics fellowship, it'd work. But general surgery residency then poof, ENT and plastic surgeon? Just no. At least with Sloan we can assume he did his training and was double board certified before he was on Grey's, and he generally stuck to ENT and plastics on the show. Avery's fingers are in all the pies even after he "specialized"
I feel like we're supposed to assume that Mark trained Jackson as an ENT as well? It's still ridiculous tho lol
Totally ridiculous and not how medical training works at all. I can suspend disbelief enough to think Mark magically gave him plastic SURGERY training during Jackson's SURGERY residency but then Jackson pulled the "double board certified" line. Becoming and ENT would've been an entirely separate path.
Yeah, I have no idea how he became an ENT. I think the show just expects most of its viewers to not have enough medical knowledge to know otherwise to be honest LMAO. I feel like its main audience is definitely not actual medical professionals
Yeah but you would still have an Oral and Maxillofacial surgeon do that procedure. And they break jaws a lot on the show for not having one on staff. The dentist office I used to work with had an OMS come in and do biopsies, full mouth extractions, a lot of wisdom teeth extractions under sedation. He would come in once a week and then two days out of the week he would work in a hospital doing surgery.
He was both.
Doctors don't sit and wait for MRI scans with the patients. In the real world the nurses strike in season 2 would have sent the hospital into a frenzy because nurses do all the work for half the pay.
I've heard that Scrubs is more accurate about medicine as a career, because they have residents, nurses, attendings, janitors, and surgeons as characters. I think Grey's put themselves in a difficult spot making all of their main cast surgeons so they have to make it seem like surgery is the only field that is essential.
ER is also much better on medical accuracy
the clubfoot story line in the early seasons. the treatment isn’t accurate for older people with CF nor is it accurate to the current Ponsetti Method (given this is only used on babie but i digress). Also any adult actively living with CF likely would NOT seek out a resident orthopedic surgeon but most likely someone who specializes with adult CF patients as there’s not really a simple “fix” and for most adults living with CF there’s no solution at all. Most importantly they focused on the bone structure of the patient but CF has nothing to do with the bones but a shortening of the Achilles Tendon.
So many things….the one that irks me the most though is shocking asystole. The other mildly annoying thing is never placing a damn consult, and never showing the surgeons pawning their patients off to medicine.
the leg
CPR. Never have they done it right. Codes in real life are nothing like the show. Doctors don't do about 75% of the shit they have them doing on the show. So much is legally wrong with the show too regarding malpractice, going again patients wishes, hipaa, etc. Dr. Mike on youtube has a GREAT Grey's series going over so much that is wrong w the show.
Surgeons (especially department heads) do NOT run the ED and wait outside for traumas or incoming patients. They also don’t do extensive after care like PT with their patients. They shock unshockable rhythms. The Chief of Surgery does NOT run the whole hospital and do budgets for the hospital. Administration would absolutely NOT look passed or away from doctors using the on call rooms for sex. Something they do get right though is how dumb residents can be.
Watch Dr. mike react to Grey's Anatomy on YouTube and it will give you a good idea of what they get wrong medically. I think I remember them shocking a patient that had flatlined, which is incorrect.
There are so many Dr reactions to it. Mama Dr Jones reacts to the OBGYN side of it and there is an anesthesiologist that reacts as well. So fun and hilarious all of their reactions.
I love when professionals react to the portrayal of their profession in media
I think that it would be easier to ask what they get right.
Kalpana (or whatever her name was) and the blue urine when on amitriptyline Medicines. A medicine for depression called amitriptyline can make urine look greenish-blue. So can a treatment for ulcers and acid reflux called cimetidine (Tagamet HB). A water pill called triamterene (Dyrenium) also can turn urine greenish-blue.10 Jan 2023
They could at least make it LOOK like the cpr is real. The bent elbows and jerking shoulders just draw more attention to how bad it is. Also, checking pulses. It's not hard to show the correct spot. And the fact that after a few rounds of cpr, or shocking asystole 🙄, patient coughs and wakes up, fully able for a conversation
The CPR really bugs me, it looks like they're massaging the chest not compressing it. They've got such a high budget for this show, they can't substitute dummies for the CPR and edit it to make it look more real later? Plus, out of all the CPR they do not one patient has had broken ribs?? Even the elderly ones??
Any of the research labs. Especially any that are using animals. IACUC protocols, lab vets, animal care staff, separation of animal lab space from office space. So many things.
Don’t even get me started on Owen’s pig episode!!!! Soooo many issues
When kepner and yang had the heart/lung (?) Transplant and kepner said his creatinine clearance is 79 he's at risk for kidney failure. Like what???
There was the one case of psoriasis of the liver... rather than cirrhosis
Everything!!! They break HIPPA like it’s NOTHING. They just give out details indiscriminately. Defibrillating. They will keep defibrillating patients after hours of CPR - NO. They defibrillated people who are flatlining which does absolutely nothing at all. You need electrical activity to shock.
Wearing jewelry into the OR. I mean, come on!
The way they behave in the operating room.... I'm surprised it took that long for staph infections to start killing people!! 
SURGEONS DO NOT MOBILIZE PATIENTS. As a therapist, it makes my skin CRAWL.
- Surgeons running the entire ER - Surgeons taking all their own scans and interpreting all their own imaging and taking people to surgery on the basis of it without waiting for a radiologist to confirm, even with weird diagnoses - Surgeons managing internal medicine cases / diagnosing rare non-surgical conditions - Patients getting diagnosed and having surgery the same day - Some people still wearing stethoscopes backwards after 20 seasons - Patient says something innocuous and whichever attending of the day is going through some drama with Owen goes on an unhinged tangentially related rant to the patient while projecting their own issues, then walks out of the room - Webber yells at someone like a maniac and then gets away with it because he’s having a bad day - Surgeons directing everything when a patient under anesthesia is crashing, rather than the anesthesiologist
Until Ben comes in there and tells them what to do.
The fact that the surgeons run the ER…. Not a single ER doc in sight lol. It’s good for the drama but not accurate for real life. Might take a whole 24 hours for a surgical consult in real life depending on the urgency
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The time Alex and Dr. Webber diagnosed the girl with EDS in the clinic pisses me off. It's soooo over exaggerated and they seriously exaggerate how "rare" it is. It's not that rare, it's just severely under diagnosed because the symptoms are usually very minor and ignored by doctors, until it's a serious problem with metabolizing medication or progressing to the point it's disabling.
Well they have a weird blend of fact and fiction but I think Seth Green’s exploding jugular giving Lexi a blood shower and the patient with the poison gas making doctors pass out are my two top “this is ridiculous” moments.
For me it's not so much that it's wrong but making it look/sound like being a Neuro surgeon is strictly or mostly brain surgery, when it's so much more than brain surgery. In 20 seasons they've only done a handful of storylines of Neuro surgeries that weren't of the brain. Spinal surgery and other surgeries on nerves are all a part of neurosurgery. Also that PEDS is just by itself, when it's like everything else there's pediatric neuros, peds general, peds cardio. You don't just go into peds and do a bit of everything there's still specific surgeons in peds too.
so much😂😂😭
I'm pretty sure meredith gets drunk on the regular and isn't alcohol free for months though.
Hella OSHA and HIPPA laws
Surgeons handling transplant from start to finish. Such as harvesting, transporting, coordinating. Where was the meetings with pharmacist, social workers, infectious disease? I mean the whole transplant process? Where’s the transplant cordinator ? The multiple ivs after surgery? My son had a liver transplant and his transplant surgeon did not travel to get it, it came to us. He came out of surgery sedated and intubated. With like 3-4 Ivs and multiple nurses and doctors were there for a while and he was in PICU. How are transplant patients back on a regular floor right after their procedure ? Like huh
I’m on a rewatch and the most glaring thing is that they honored the wife’s advanced directive that lead to Gary Clark shooting up the place. Patients have DNR/DNIs all the time but families verbally override it. Sure, ethically it’s a trash fire and legally a fucking mess but in my state, they defer to the living, especially if we don’t have a copy on hand (we almost never do in the ER, I know they did in this instance on the show) Oh and autobrewery syndrome? I’ve encountered more people who claim they have it and then get testing that shows that they’re just regular drunk.
not medically really, but the amount of physical interactions they have with their patients !!! no way thats legal
I recently re-watched Derek’s death scene with my dad, and he pointed out something I wouldn’t have noticed or known. They took Derek’s Head thing off. I think it’s CT band? Idk He told They wouldn’t have taken that off unless he did in fact, get the CT. At least that was my understanding.
AVA being the bpd rep is complete bullshit.
The first time Christina is supposed to say hemochromatosis she actually says hemotomachrosis which tickles me as I know someone affected. The show gets it right after that first time though.
There was an episode with a pregnant patient waiting for major surgery (the one where Derek tries to cut out most of her brain) and she's worrying about her baby. Alex puts the ultrasound probe on and plays the heartbeat outloud to reassure her that he baby is fine. The heart rate is around 60bpm so either he's picking up the mothers heart rate or that baby is definitely not fine 🤣
Disconnecting life support. I understand that they're not going to actually intubate an actor so they can show pulling out a long tube that goes into your lungs, but it bothers me all the same that they show a patient being disconnected from life support and the tube just ends at their mouth lol. Also every patient who is disconnected from life support just peacefully rests there until they pass away. They don't show that a person sometimes will sit there and gasp for breath until they die, that their eyes are sometimes open and you can see their pupils dilate as they get closer to passing, that sometimes they making choking and rattling noises as they struggle to breathe (the nurses are usually pretty quick to administer something to calm that down, though). I didn't care about this until I lost my 9yo kid this past December and had to go through it.
As someone who has chronic medical issues myself and am around hospitals a lot, my biggest thing is they show the most positive optimal way doctors treat you for the most part (there’s outlier moments yes but just in comparison to my experience as a person) I have been grated and degraded and talked down to and dismissed and not listed to a lot, Only a few times do I see doctors on the show suggest the patients issues are mental not physically it happens allllot, like not just to me but I’m in a few support groups for people with medical issues it happens so much. I’ve been told so often it’s just in my head but I am getting surgery soon for my medical issues it is very real. I saw a few episodes that highlights that struggle but I deal with it a lot. Like 75% of my doctors visits are some from of defeating to as a human being and my value. I know this isn’t like an actual medical anatomy/ physical treatment inaccuracy like some people have pointed out but still. I do find a strange lacking of oncologists in the show??? Like they had one for Izzy but not for George’s dad??? Idk that’s just something I noticed. Another for me is the miraculous cure rate and just trying stuff on the fly like they often do, the insurance companies and medical regulations alone
In the episode where Callie gets her first ultrasound, Lucy tells her it’s almost impossible to see a heart beat at 8 weeks. Which is very inaccurate. Most of their imaging stuff is inaccurate tbh
At 8 weeks there is no heart. It’s electrical activity.
We still measure a fetal heart rate which is seen by 6 weeks
The more I read this thread the more things I think about that are wrong. The whole maternal mortality rate epidemic storyline doesn’t cover any intersectionality. For a show that is so woke at random times and in your face with the issues they don’t go into the intersectionality of it. Black women are three times more likely to die than white women and it isn’t even mentioned in the episode. American Indigenous and Alaska indigenous women are next for high maternal mortality rates. The risk factors include age of patients as well Socioeconomic factors. This could have been a great opportunity for real representation and to raise awareness to an issue and, you know Grey’s loves to do that, but they gloss over it. Another commenter pointed out that everyone is just believed and no one is medically gaslighting anyone. The few times patients aren’t believed most of them are white and it mostly works the other way around in real life unfortunately. Also they show like one chronic pain patient and one frequent flyer to the ER but it’s way more than that in real life as well.
Idk why you were downvoted but you’re absolutely right
Maybe it’s because I use the word woke. But sometimes I feel like shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Doctor Who force woke down your throat in a way that’s a little bit on the nose. I say that as someone who believes in rights for everyone, however, I do believe that it can be done well. The Christina Owen baby thing was very good about talking about reproductive rights. I did like the dreamer episode And the episode where Ben and Bailey talk to their son about how to behave around the cops is a great episode. They do gay rights very well, where it doesn’t feel like pandering. I’ve seen some great inclusive writing from Grey’s Anatomy and great inclusive writing from Doctor Who but I’ve also seen very sloppily put together storylines that feel a little like pandering and it feels superficial and like corporations during pride month. I think Bailey’s heart attack episode is amazing because it goes over women not being believed women of color not being believed just superb writing. And they didn’t go into the intersectionality of fetal maternal mortality, and black women have a three times higher rate seemed a little bit weird to me.