I can watch any old legal or police procedural show: any iteration of Law & Order or CSI is fine for me: it’s like popcorn for the mind. But I have never been able to sit through an episode of any medical show whatsoever: generally like any hospital visit, I find them at once boring and uncomfortable. Am I unusual in this? Does it go the other way, where ER or Scrubs fans can’t stand Law & Order?
See I’m hit and miss on this. I think it has a lot to do with the quality of the show and what I think of the storylines and characters rather than its genre classification. I could watch L&O (Original Flavor, occasionally SVU, never any of the other brands, and no CSI type shows.) I loved Scrubs, but other than one early season I found ER dull. Everyone else’s mileage will undoubtedly vary.
It all depends. We’re talking fictional shows here, and for me it is less the environment that they are in but who the characters are and what the plot is. I prefer Grey’s Anatomy over Scrubs because I feed off of drama, I prefer SVU out of all the L&O series because Stabler and Benson are as much the stars as the actual cases. The more personal a storyline gets on House, the more I’m into that episode. I prefer Criminal Minds over CSI because CM will go past your comfort zone with the dramatic cases.
So, um, like I said, combo of characters and amount of drama.
I’m a hypochondriac who doesn’t like gore. So I can enjoy anything that is drama sans death and gore. So no CSI.
What about “In treatment?” I find it strangely alluring; does that classify as a medi-drama?
Medical shows appeal to lawyers, and lawyer shows appeal to doctors; in each case the profession watching their own on TV can’t enjoy it because everything is SO INCREDIBLY WRONG, but when watching the other profession are blissfully ignorant, even if they can guess it’s probably inaccurate.
At least that is what I (attorney) and my Sister-in-Law (doctor) have concluded. There are more types and styles of medical professsionals (Doctors, nurses, technicians, medical researchers, etc, number 4 million), hence the greater numerosity, popularity and longevity of lawyer shows. 
It’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Yeah, Quality is the big point.
Apart from Mythbusters (and maybe Project Runway) I don’t watch anything enough to speak with authority, but…
I’ll watch House because the writing convinces me he’s a genius. But I rarely like the plot twists (OMG, that patient has suddenly begun bleeding!)
On Law&O the plot twists were nice. They seemed to be adapted from weird real life cases.
I’ll occasionally watch part of NCIS (which is partly medical) because Davida and Abby are cute.
I loved Ally Mcbeal and liked Raising the Bar. No other lawyer shows have ever appealed to me…well, except for Night Court, but I doubt that counts. On the other hand, there are probably close to a dozen medical shows I’ve advidly watched, so I think I support the OP’s supposition.
Well, it seems that Flashforward was trying to capture both markets, but I guess that didn’t end up working out for them. I think I remember an anecdote that there are three major TV markets - medical, procedural, and something else which I can’t remember at the moment, and they were told to pick two.