I’ve been watching Fringe on Netflix, and have seen this several times on that show, but I’ve also seen it in other shows and movies as well:
The doctor/bad guy/whoever is injecting their subject with some kind of drug (usually some sort of mind-altering substance), and they bring out this hypodermic with a 2" to 3" needle … which they proceed to drive all the way into the subject’s arm.
This runs completely counter to every injection I’ve ever received, i.e. “carefully insert just the tip of the needle into one of those painfully obvious large veins in my forearm”.
I understand “dramatic license”, and can understand the psychological impact on the viewer of seeing the needle driven all the way in … in a case where the subject of the injection is an unwilling victim. But I’ve seen the same thing in scenes where the subject is completely willing.
The answer to all questions of this form is pretty much always “No, Hollywood has no idea how __________ works.” (See also Sjöberg’s Law of Cinematic Innacurracy.) Hell, even when they make a move about making movies, it will almost certainly not actually be an accurate depiction of the movie-making process. (“They film all of the scenes in order, right? And all the special effects and sound are all part of that, right?”)
Mostly it’s a matter of Dramatic License and/or Rule of Cool (or at least Rule of Not-Watching-Paint-Dry).
I also admit that while I have been the subject of properly done intravenous needle placements (which indeed look like nothing I’ve ever seen in a movie or on TV) I actually have no idea what the proper procedure for giving a fast-acting sedative injection to some uncooperative person looks like.
Or, you know, it might be an intramuscular drug. I’ve used intramuscular Geodon on patients before. Calms them the fuck down and a 21 gauge needle is about an inch and a half long. Sometimes what you think is bullshit… isn’t.
Yes those Hollywood types don’t know intravenous drugs. A well worn complaint. Everyone is always complaining about the lack of drug knowledge when watching movies.
I think the OP’s hickup here is that he forgot about intramuscular injections. A flu shot is intramuscular. If you watch a wildlife show where they bring down an animal with a tranquilizer dart, that’s also intramuscular. If you stab somebody in the arm with a syringe full of horse tranquilizers they are going to go down the same way the water buffalo or whatever did on Animal Planet.
I mention it again because it leads to this: Too frequently Hollywood also forgets about intramuscular drugs. I have no problem with the arm thing. That’s very plausible. But how many times have we seen the bad guy sneak up behind somebody and inject them in the neck? There is no way IN HELL that would work. Why the fuck would anybody try to use the Jugular, even if the drug did need to be administered intravenous?
Why wouldn’t it work? Generally the bad guy isn’t concerned with the potential risks of an arterial stick. Are you saying it’s too hard to get the needle tip into one of the major veins or arteries in the neck, or are you saying it would somehow not be effective at knocking them out quickly?
I think if you choose the right part of the neck, one with a lot of large arteries and veins, and then choose a needle length to maximize your probability of actually ending up with the end of the needle in one of the actual veins, you might be able to pull off that move that Dexter does with the tranquilizer. I don’t know for sure - this isn’t standard medical practice, so you might be inventing a new technique here, and you might need to test it on a mockup of a neck or a cadaver. The main thing is raising the probability - anatomic variance, fat in the neck, the fact that Dexter does it from behind and usually in the dark - means it might not be reliable. However, I suspect it’s plausible.
I’m saying the bad guy will miss. I’m also saying that in terms or pure practicality you do not even attempt intravenous. You go intramuscular. Any idiot can stab a needle into the deltoid.
I’m not a “bad guy”, but I’m an RN, and that’s what I’d do.
To some extent exact verisimilitude is unused to blur knowledge from an impressionable audience: they don’t want to give people ideas as to the ease and desirability of a procedure. [ Even if one believes all narcotics should be legal, giving people a YouTube instructional on how to inject heroin wouldn’t be a good idea. ]
And many of the audience will have no idea what is correct anyway. I haven’t had an injection since leaving school.
Would this be related to the way they never actually show a character taking pills? Even legal medication? Instead, they’ll show the character shaking the pills into the palm of their hand, and then bringing their cupped palm to their mouth, covering their whole mouth with their palm, so you never actually see the pills going into their mouth.
It used to be you could not show needles going into people. it was the TV Code, or something. Even on a show like Emergency!, they always either block the view of the injection with another character, or conveniently have the injection site off camera. Only recently has actually injection been “allowed” on TV.
And in the realm of “not teaching useful skills”, in shows where the intrepid private detective picks a door lock, the almost universally showed only one lock pick being used. I guess they didn’t want to teach actual lockpicking to middle America. Now they show two picks almost all the time.
A former roommate of mine (now deceased) was effectively “addicted” to herbal supplements. He had some unspecified medical condition (I mean “unspecified” literally; nobody could figure out what ailed him), and his doctor kept suggesting one herbal remedy after another. Except my roommate never replaced the old supplement with the new. He added each new supplement to the battery of supplements he was already taking. So a large part of his day involved downing questionable pills, and I got to see a lot of this. And I could not help noticing that he put the pills into his mouth in exactly the same way they show it on TV. He’s literally the only person I’ve seen take pills that way IRL.
But that fit with everything else about him, in that his entire personality seemed to be completely “manufactured”, and based on behavior he had seen on TV (and read in self-help books). He seemed to want to be Mister Rogers.
Yup. In the most recent instance I’ve viewed (the one that finally prompted me to start this thread), the main character has been trapped in an alternate universe, while her alternate universe double has come to our universe. The alternate-universe baddies have a way of imprinting one person’s mind/personality onto another person, and in this case they’re trying to convince the our-universe character that she is actually the alternate-universe version of herself. Their method involves injecting a substance that somehow contains the other person’s memories/personality (they didn’t even bother with technobabble to explain how that would work). But that sounds to me like a “mind-altering substance” that would be better injected intravenously than intramuscularly.
When I was given the mandatory VD lecture in Vietnam, the medic told us that if we “started dripping like a faucet,” we would be unable to return home when our tour was over, and we would “get a 60cc penicillin injection in the right side of the left nut. With a long, square needle. {pause} Four times!”