This question was originally posted on Quora.com and was answered by Jonathan Ankin Dranoff, Physician/scientist, administrator, dad, aesthete Medical dramas are painful for me to watch. The other night, my wife put on a new show called “The Good Doctor”. As we were watching, I noted so many things that galled me that I annoyed my wife (who constantly reminded me - this is fiction - you do understand that, right?). Let me just point out some ridiculous points. At one point, two of the residents or fellows perform an elective invasive procedure called a transesophageal echocardiogram (TEE). At 8–9 PM. On a critically ill child. With no anesthesia or nursing support. With no attending physician present. Why? So that the drama could show a dimly lit hospital and contrast that scene with a dinnertime discussion between two other characters. To be clear, in real life, that procedure would have been performed in an ICU or operating suite with all necessary people present, in normal working hours, and an attending physician would have been directing the case for its entirety (in fact, billing for the procedure without the attending physician would be illegal). One of the residents/fellows in the case above put on her gloves then immediately brushed her hair. Nice job contaminating the gloves unnecessarily. The consensus of the two attending physicians on the case - a pediatric thoracic surgeon and a pediatric cardiologist - was that the child’s heart was irreparable surgically. However, the patient’s mother convinced the surgeon to change his mind based on her assertion that her shaman (oh yeah, did I mention that the patient and his mom were pastiche-level Africans from a nameless village with every caricature possible shown) had stated that the surgeon was the chosen one to heal her son. On the B-plot case, a surgical specimen from a biopsy of the vocal cords was lost. Aside from the ludicrous nature of the hunt for the biopsy specimen, there was the crazy suggestion from a risk management professional that the staff was not to apologize for a lost specimen, since that would somehow lead to a lawsuit. There was also no discussion of safeguards to prevent such an event for the future. Lastly, there was no discussion as to why a repeat biopsy simply could not be obtained (or if there was, I was too distracted to hear it). In reality, the role of the risk management specialist would be to ensure that the patient’s needs were met, that safeguards were put in place to prevent a recurrence, to review active procedures, and to mitigate further damage to all parties. In addition, the show was lazily written, with characters kept as shallow as possible, unnecessary involvement of sexual attraction between characters on multiple occasions, and a weird subplot regarding ambitions of major characters to assume a hospital presidency. Which is really weird, since the show is supposed to be about a bright young man with Autism Spectrum Disorder working in the medical establishment. And “The Good Doctor” was still much better than “Gray’s (frickin’) Anatomy”. Source
