General Purpose Statement: To inform my audience of the inaccuracies in medical drams and how they impact the medical community.
Specific Purpose Statement: By listening to my speech, my audience will learn how medical dramas contain medical inaccuracies, wrongly depict doctor’s personal lives, and how this impacts the medical community.
I. Introduction
A. AGD: How many of you have ever watched an episode of a medical drama, such as ER, House, Scrubs, or Grey’s Anatomy? Now how many of you are actually plan on practicing medicine?
a. Wait for show of hands
b. Ask how many people plan on ever seeing a doctor
B. Link to Topic: Many of these dramas actually contain factual inaccuracies, which are contributing to an epidemic in the medical field.
C. Credibility Statement: Just like many of you, I enjoy watching medical dramas. In fact, I have been frantically trying to catch up on Grey’s Anatomy before the season premiere tonight. While I don’t plan on practicing medicine, I plan on interacting with medical professionals at some point.
D. Significance Statement: Even those of you who don’t watch medical dramas are affected by the perception of the medical community that these shows perpetuate.
E. Thesis Statement: Medical dramas are rife with inaccuracies that harm the medical community and their relationships with their patients.
F. Preview Statement: I’ll start by explaining the medical inaccuracies, followed by the wrongful depiction of doctors’ personal lives, and finish by
In the episode “Give Peace A Chance” of Grey’s Anatomy, Dr. Derek Shepherd is given an impossible case and has to make a decision to cut out a massive spinal tumor of a lab technician he is familiar with at the hospital. The chief of the hospital and Dr. Shepherd are having a hard time with some of the decisions the chief has recently made regarding the hospital’s merger and this creates conflict further into the episode. A resident doctor in the hospital, Dr. Karev, is having troubles with his cancer wife who has fled and left him with an enormous amount of bills from the hospital for her recent treatments. This episode uses all parts of the rhetorical triangle, but particularly through pathos doctors in the episode are able to heavily connect with the audience.
In the article The Doctor Won’t See You Now by James Gorman, the author achieves his purpose of ridiculing the unethical functions of doctors during the aids epidemic by utilizing sarcastic language, negatively connotated diction, and vague supplication of details in his arguments. For example, after Gorman depicts the prevalence of doctors’ preferences of not treating certain patients, he makes the remark “ Smart thinking”. This sarcastic remark, similar to others within the text, is used in order to exhibit the author’s obvious feeling of anger toward physicians who act unprofessionally. Furthermore, his selection of vocabulary, such as “ slob”, “stupid”, and “pig-like,” forms offensive generalizations of people intended to demonstrate how
"Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error…" (John Hopkins Medicine). This soaring number has caused medical errors to become the third leading cause of death in the United States. For many people, medicine seems foreign and unknown. People who have lost loved ones due to medical error desperately look for a reason, and many times that blame falls upon doctors. Media has put a negative connotation on doctors as well, causing their reputation to plummet whenever a hospital procedure turns badly. A renown surgeon and author, Atul Gawande, uses his knowledge and experience to give people a new perspective on medicine. In the article "When Doctors Make Mistakes," Gawande uses rhetorical appeals: ethos, pathos, and logos to prove the need for a change in the medical systems and procedures. He analyzes how the public looks at doctors, giving a new perspective to enlighten the reader that even the best doctors can make mistakes.
According to the Institute of Medicine, “At least 44,000 people, and perhaps as many as 98,000 people, die in hospitals each year as a result of medical errors” (Kohn et al.). Despite the unfortunate consequences, medical errors provide an important foundation for medicine. An immense uncertainty envelopes the medical field, and frequent leaps must be made. Some of these ventures are prosperous; however, many render unsuccessful. In Complications, Atul Gawande crafts an alluring view of the medical unknown using tales of his personal medical mistakes. Through the use of ethos, logos, and pathos, Atul Gawande argues that medicine’s vast uncertainty has beneficial influence upon society.
November, 1999 brought about a release of a report prepared by the prestigious National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM) making medical mistakes and their magnitude of the risks to patients receiving hospital care to common public knowledge. The IOM concluded that between 44,000-98,000 deaths occur annually because of medical errors. Among a general agreement was that system deficiencies were the most important factor in the problem and not incompetent or negligent physicians and other caregivers (Sultz & Young, 2010). An excellent example of a system deficiency that leads to a crisis and sentinel event was the highly publicized overdose of Heparin to Dennis Quaid’s newborn twins in 2007.
Atul Gawande in his article “When the Doctor Makes Mistakes” exposes the mystery, uncertainty and fallibility of medicine in true stories that involve real patients. In a society where attorneys protect hospitals and physicians from zealous trials from clients following medical errors, doctors make mistakes is a testimony that Gawande a representative of other doctors speak openly about failures within the medical fields. In this article, Gawande exposes those errors with an intention of showing the entire society and specifically those within the medicine field that when errors are hidden, learning is squelched and those within the system are provided with an opportunity to continue committing the same errors. What you find when you critically analyse Gawande, “When Doctors Make Mistakes essay is how messy and uncertain medicine turns out to be. Throughout the entire article you experience the havoc within the medicine field as the inexperienced doctor misapplies a central line in a patient.
Prominently featured in the mission statements of virtually of every medical school and medical institution in the world is the call for empathetic doctors. These institutions wish to train medical professionals that possess qualities of sympathy and compassion, and hospitals wish to employ health professionals that showcase similar qualities. The reality, however, is starkly different, as physicians, jaded by what they have seen in the medical world, lose the qualities that drove them to medicine in the first place. In Frank Huyler’s “The Blood of Strangers,” a collection of short stories from his time as a physician in the emergency room, Huyler uses the literary techniques of irony and imagery to depict the reality of the world of a medical professional. While Huyler provides several examples of both techniques in his accounts, moments from “A Difference of Opinion” and “The Secret” in particular stand out. Huyler uses irony and imagery in these two pieces to describe how medical professionals have lost their sense of compassion and empathy due to being jaded and desensitized by the awful incidents they have witnessed during their careers.
Grey’s Anatomy is the longest running series medical drama due to its immense popularity. Since 2005, it has successfully pulled in a maximum audience of approximately 37.88 million viewers on The American Broadcasting Company television network (“Rating History: Grey’s Anatomy”). It provides a first-person perspective into the dramatic everyday life of the main character, Meredith Grey, throughout her experiences as a surgeon in a scandalous hospital. This drama is most popular because of the aspects besides the accurate medical implications such as sexual relationships, glorified surgeries, and lack of regard for the medical code of ethics. Grey’s Anatomy romanticizes and the medical profession in a manner similar to The Heart most prominently displayed during the scenes discussing the fate of the deceased boy’s organs and the unprofessional nature of the nurses.
Grey’s Anatomy is a popular television show on ABC that airs Thursday night’s at 7:00. In television land, this is known as a primetime slot. Season 11 has an average of 8.22 million viewers and has been renewed for one more season (Grey 's Anatomy TV Show on ABC). Grey’s Anatomy is well-known for its mind blowing medical scenarios and incredibly talented doctors. Both of these leave viewers with pondering thoughts of what they would do in similar situations, and a bit of self confidence on handling a situation if an actual person collapsed in front of them. The study will examine the amount of viewers who binge watch the show between the ages of 17 and 21 declaring Pre-Med as their major at a four-year university because they believe it will be as easy as the television show depicts being a doctor is.
Chasing Zero is a documentary which was meant to both educate the viewer on the prevalence of medical harm as well as to enlighten both the public and health care providers on the preventability of these events (Discovery, 2010). The documentary expounded on the fact each year more people die each year from a preventable medical error than die due to breast cancer, motor vehicle accidents or AIDS (Institute of Medicine, 1999). Medical harm can result from adverse drug events, surgical injuries, wrong-site surgery, suicides, restraint-related injuries, falls, burns, pressure ulcers and mistaken patient identities (Institute of Medicine, 1999). Incidences of medical error have been reported in the media for many years. The most startling
In conclusion, Person introduces two conflicting opinions of the main message, medical ethics. However, there is a bias towards Jenna’s initial view, and the opinions of Lily and Alleys. Overall, the author uses this book as a way of showing us the ever-more relevant debate of medical ethics, but wants us to make our own decision of what view to
With that being said, the show could also encourage those who are interested in medicine and the medical field to dive further into their passions and see what the field entails. Therefore, the overall health impact of Grey’s Anatomy could be seen as both a hindrance as well as an advantage within
The movie “The Doctor” is a good example of how communications in the health field work to benefit not only the patient, but the doctor too. In this movie, the main character, also known as Jack McKee, is a heart surgeon. The movie begins by showing how McKee’s attitude towards his patients tends to be inappropriate. Jack jokes about his patients and laughs at their concerns. His home life is also a struggle; his relationships with his wife and son are falling apart. The movie takes a turn when Jack becomes suddenly ill. He begins coughing up blood. He meets with a specialist by the name of Lesley. Tests reveal that Jack has a serious tumor on his vocal cords. He has now become the patient. He begins treatment but the results
In the periodical Medical Errors: Where are We Now it says that a study that was conducted showed that only thirty percent of the patients were told about their medical errors. (Mewshaw, White, Walrath. p. 51)
I first started watching “Grey’s Anatomy” on a gloomy Saturday morning during my freshman year of high school. I was bored so I decided to browse for new shows to watch and came across “Grey’s Anatomy”. At first, I was a bit skeptical of the show because I thought it would a typical medical show where the doctors were very serious, and there would not be a story line, just surgeries. After the first episode, I realized I was wrong, the show humorous and addicting. I zoomed