Television has no shortage of doctor dramas. Whether you’re an avid House fan or dedicated to Grey’s Anatomy, you are familiar with the miraculous phenomena that occur every day in these hospitals. Contrary to popular belief, real hospitals are not the abundance of diagnostic mysteries as Dr. House depicts them to be. If you’re a new intern at a hospital, you probably will not fall for a dreamy resident whilst dodging his estranged wife who wants to get back together… probably. Unfortunately, many of our favorite doctor dramas fabricate not only drugs or clinical trials, but also blur the lines between entertainment and what really happens in various medical procedures and practices. While entertaining for viewers, it creates a potentially dangerous dissonance between the anticipated experiences—as fostered by these shows—and the actual experience. New York Times writer Dhruv Khullar elaborates on this distinct difference in his article “The CPR We Don’t See on TV.” Khullar notes that the gap was so wide between what he was prepared to see, likely from TV shows, and what he actually saw, that the patient “looked more like a survivor of CPR than of cardiac arrest.” Many CPR patients suffer blunt trauma including bruising, bleeding, or fractures to the ribs, sternum or local organs. As an almost-doc and certified EMT, one of the most frustrating things to watch is TV CPR. However, it is worth noting that performing CPR is not recommended on a healthy individual due to the risk of blunt trauma, which perhaps explains why we don’t see accurate CPR on a live actor. For this reason, I could cut the actors some slack, but they could at least use the correct hand position… Excuses aside, CPR is not the only procedure that is a victim of the entertainment industry. Drowning victims won’t cough up or sputter out cups and cups of water; fluid in the lungs is never coughed up in fact. Patients flat lining, or in asystole, are never shocked. (Spoiler alert, I think Meredith Grey then might be dead.) Defibrillation is used to interrupt insufficient and abnormal electrical rhythms like ventricular fibrillation or ventricular tachycardia. My personal favorite “procedure” is the life-saving heart injection, since of course there is absolutely no risk of bleeding out when you stab a needle into someone’s heart… Now, if your friend were having a severe allergic reaction, your first instinct may not be to dramatically plunge her EpiPen into her heart like you saw in Pulp Fiction, but there are greater risks from all this misinformation. In an article published by CNN, Dr. Ken Murray states his belief that “people have too high expectations about what’s going to happen. They think you’re going to do CPR and 99 times out of 100 times (the patient will) be revived which is just not the case.” While survival rates are only approximate, a study from the Journal of the American Heart Association from 2009 suggests that some 24% of CPR patients admitted to the hospital survive; then only 8% survive to be discharged. Meanwhile, according to a 2012 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, only approximately 2% of adults in cardiac arrest who received CPR recover fully. Former AHA Emergency Cardiovascular Care Committee Chairman, Dr. Michael Sayre disproves of attitudes like that of Dr. Murray, explaining, “If you expect it to go poorly, then it will.” Furthermore, survival rates do vary from city to city and depend on the availability and quality of pre-hospital care. We cannot conclude much about exact survival rates, but whatever they may be, pessimism towards performing CPR is never an option; Dr. Sayre is not the only one who has told us that if we think we are going to fail, then we will certainly not succeed… I do not condone opting out of CPR or skipping your local CPR class. If you have the opportunity to equip yourself with a life-saving skill, no matter how many or how few people it may save, you should take it. However, I believe we have a right to know, to prepare ourselves for what the real emergency most likely will bring. Source
