I saw this ad on TV for a new Fox show called The Resident.

All I can say is GOD MOTHER-FUCKING DAMNIT!!!  Not this bullshit again.

I am so fucking tired of this trope.  The good doctor doesn’t care about the money and bad doctor and/or hospital administrator treats medicine like a business.

This was at the heart of House [MD}, the Kelso/Cox fight in Scrubs, the doctor cousin in Judging Amy (my sister watched it which means we all watched it), Dr. Kovac on ER, pretty much every medical drama show I can think of, even Dr. Winchester in M*A*S*H.

The good doctor is out to save the patients and the bad doctors/administrators are just in it for profit.  Saving lives vs. making money.

This is such horseshit.

I might come close to believing it if the median salary for MD’s wasn’t $197,000.  When the “lowest paid” specialties command $156,000 a year on average  and the highest command an average of $315,000 per year, I have a hard time believing they aren’t in it, at least a little bit, for the money.

You know what happens when medicine isn’t treated like a business?

There are no doctors and hospitals run out of medicine, and linens, and toilet paper, and look like this.

I’ve never seen a TV show in which the “I’m here to save lives, not make a profit” break-all-the-rules doctor work in a shithole like that.  They always do it in some beautiful, palatial hospital, packed with the latest in million dollar medical equipment.

I just want to take the entire writing staff of this stupid fucking show and drop them off at a hospital in Caracas for their next annual check-ups.

Fuck this bullshit.

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By J. Kb

8 thoughts on “More Medical Drama Bulls**t”
  1. Jeez, dude, you need to switch to decaf. It’s a TV show, not a documentary.
    My favorite med-show trope is when one of the doctors says (as one always does, on every show), “When we make mistakes, people die.” Just once I want to see a TV doc say, “When we make mistakes, people sue.”
    But that’s just me.

    1. The point is this shit drives the popular culture. When a bunch of kids believe that only the bad doctors like money, they vote for Universal Healthcare.

  2. As a paramedic I was making more take home than the ER docs because they were the ones that got sued the most. The malpractice insurance was through the roof. Over half of your ER visit is medically unnecessary test to keep the lawyers at bay. I saw a guy who fell come in w a fx wrist get treated and released only to have a heart attack six months later. Yes wife sued because doc & hosp should have know his fat ass had clogged arteries and done something. Hospital won but at $100,000 in legal fees, want to cut cost kill all the lawyers or at least reform the laws that let stupid suits to be filed.

  3. Eh, it’s Hollywood. They know as much about medicine as they do about firearms, forensics, and engineering.
    If the Plot-O-Matic 3000 says you got to haz dramas between the Oh So Caring Hero and the eeeee-vil profit minded, you gets dramas.

  4. Point of order:

    House didn’t care so much about healing the patient as he was about being RIGHT…which meant solving the weekly ‘mystery’ ailment, and if the patient got well as a result, mores the better. His TEAM were the ones usually concerned with the patient.

  5. J Kb. You might actually like this movie I just came across.

    The Hospital (1971) with George C. Scott as the lead. It seems more like today then a film from the ’70s.

    I thought it was freaking hilarious.

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