Well this week on House there was the clinic patient who was worried about his legs - no matter where he poked his legs with his left index finger, he felt pain, but he hadn’t quite figured out that His left index finger was broken.
A few weeks ago, however, there was a case where the patient wasn’t really stupid - she was lying about an important fact about herself because the fact was that she had given birth in secret and dumped the living baby . Even at death’s door I can imagine someone not wanting her family to know that.
Not exactly. I remember it like this: centuries before on their homeworld, a group of freethinkers- the local equivalent of bohemians, radicals, parasexuals and whatnot- had said “F-U” to the moralistic predominant culture, and established their own progressive society on a island that was only accessable half the year due to sea conditions. One year sailors went out to the island at the start of the trade season, and found everyone on the island dead. Written accounts left behind detailed how a plague had devestated the island. The mainland culture declared that the plague had been God’s punishment for their sinful ways, and it became an iconic myth in their society, sort of like if a disease with specific tell-tale symptoms had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.
Except that that wasn’t the only instance of the plague. Isolated instances of it popped up from time to time, and such was the shame and stigma of it that it was invariably covered up by “respectable” people. Fast forward to the time of B5, and this time interstellar trade meant that if not quarantined the disease would spread like wildfire. But the authorities stuck their heads in the sand and presumed that penitence and prayer would spare them God’s wrath. It didn’t. The analogy to AIDS was pointed and deliberate.
This irritated me because is highly unrealistic. Yeah, I’m sure the show plays fast and loose.
But Leprosy is a very slow-acting anyway. It would not affect someone just a few years after catching it. It usually lies dormant all the way from childhood to adulthood, so the kind wouldn’t have had it, either. Finally, it doesn’t cause pain, exactly: it causes nerve damage leading to numbness. (This, in bad situations, is what leads to skin damage and extremity loss).
THAT one does make sense. I haven’t watched the show often but IIRC episodes I have seen before had patients lying about things like abusing prescription medication, engaging in risky sexual practices, or having plastic surgery.
I was talking about the first. Those two were among the most hard-hitting episodes of an SF show ever, especially the latter, where you expected a Star Trek, “Here’s the vaccine! You’re cured!” ending.
How about the parent on this season of Private Practice who refused to vaccinate her two younger sons because “vaccines made her oldest autistic”? After their vacation in Europe the middle boy was dying of the measles (yes, he did end up dying) and she still had a fit when a doctor gave her toddler the vaccine so she wouldn’t lose him too.
In the B5 episode, with the dying child, the parents refused surgery that could cure the boy because their belief was that the soul resided in the body, and would be released if cutting was performed. Dr. Franklin tried everything he could to persuade them, and when that failed he violated ethics and orders and worked on the kid anyway.
Kid is restored to health, but the parents reject him in horror, because his “soul had escaped” and a demon now animated the body. Then they pretend to rethink, take the kid back, and kill him, telling the aghast doctor it hadn’t really been the boy at all, but an evil spirit.
Titled “Believers” it was one of the saddest, IMHO, episodes of the series.
[spoiler]Though…didn’t the station staff actually succeed in creating a vaccine/cure, but by the time they’d finished it and went to the quarantine section to give it out, everyone had already died?
And it could kill Pak’ma’ra, too, due to a similar cell-type they had. I forget—was that part supposed to be an analogy, too, or just a technical point for the story?[/spoiler]
There was something like this on ER once, too, though the parent was portayed slightly more sympathetically. She wasn’t just some knee-jerk luddite, but had chosen not to vaccinate the kid(s?) based on careful research and weighing the (admittedly tiny) risks…or so she was loudly protesting to the docs, after the kid had ended up catching some hideous, potentially deadly old disease (I think it might have been Polio, but I’m not sure). :smack:
Bluntly put, my doctors know some of the most embarrassingly detailed info about me. Back when I was young and silly and actually had tried various drugs, when asked by my gp and gyn, they were told what i had previously tried. Hell, my gyn knew I was screwing around on my boyfriend and I didnt even tell my best friend I was messing around on him.
I think my various doctors know more about me than my parents and husband combined.
I have the feeling a lot of the illnesses on House are unrealistic/exaggerated or otherwise not congruent with reality. I know next to nothing about medicine, but I remember one episode where they were doing a differential on someone with hallucinations.
‘‘Could be schizophrenia.’’
‘‘That’s impossible. No genetic history of mental illness.’’ :rolleyes:
Schizophrenia was immediately ruled out based on this really poor understanding of schizophrenia. Genetics may play an important role and increase the probability of developing this illness, but it’s perfectly possible for someone with no family history of mental illness to develop schizophrenia.
I have the feeling if I were a doctor or someone who knew a great deal about diseases, that show would drive me apeshit. Since I’m completely ignorant in most cases, though, I love it.
That was the point of it, actually. The father had very slow-acting leprosy, and the son’s had been exacerbated by another illness, which in turn made the first one worse, and so on. It was like putting kanicbird and Der Trihs in the same thread: a death duel inevitably results.
Somewhat off topic… IRL this happened as I was sitting in the waiting room of a perinatologist.
Two… and I use the word loosely… parents-to-be… were railing on the invasive nature of the pre-natal questionnaire… “It’s none of their business if the father has a history of drug abuse…”, “What’s the mother’s occupation? Making babies HAW HAW HAW”, etc. I ground down several layers of enamel from my teeth as I tried to focus on my blackberry email.
The problem is (from my limited medical experience) there are a lot of stupid people coming into hospitals. Nowhere near the majority, but how do you know who you’re dealing with? Today, for instance, some guy came into the ER who had badly broken 2 finger as a result of a drunken fall. Like, his pinky and ring fingers on his left hand were pointing in directions that should not be possible. When he found out he had to wait for x-ray to be called in (small hospital, x-ray is on call on weekends) he asked if he could go home. The Dr. says, “uhh…we have to x-ray and consult a surgeon…you’ll probably have to wait an hour or 2”. He says “won’t it heal on it’s own? I don’t really use my left hand. I don’t want to wait!” So I have no trouble believing there are people as stupid as the ones on House.
I’m more than willing to believe that the proportion of stupid ER patients to non-stupid ones is greater than the proportion of stupid persons in the general population to non-stupid ones. It’s self-sorting.