This one time, in real life, I was watching Survivor, okay I’m a loser, but anyway, I noticed that the people were getting pretty thin and they were basically wearing underwear.
IANAD, but if you are a Doctor and you watch a show like that, does your clinical mind kick in…
“hmmm, he looks like he has a mild curvature of the spine. He should get that looked at.”
So my question is, when you watch TV or movies or whatever, are you checking out the people for medical disorders or are you just watching the show?
I’m guessing a little bit of both. My father is a dentist, and I’ve seen him make dental observations while watching a show, about some character’s Class III Overbite, or some other such thing.
I’d venture to say that if something falls into your area of expertise, you’re going to notice things that relate to it, even if you aren’t specifically in your “work environment”.
As a doc, I tend to turn off my clinical observation skills when watching the tube, or even during most non-work activities. Only if something stands out would I tend to notice it.
I tend to prefer a healthy balance of work, play, family, etc.
As an RN I find myself doing a quick assessment on people in the grocery stores without even realizing it.
I look at their color, how they are breathing, how swollen their feet or hands are but mostly I look at their veins. I think “Damn I could put a 16 gauge in that forearm. Wow look at his basilic! and Damn her cephalic vein is just awesome.”
This is usually after I have been forced to put an IV in a patient’s very last vein like in their thumb or index finger. I have put them in feet before too.
Unfortunately I’ll have to be sketchy with details because this took place, oh, about 10 years ago and I didn’t follow it too closely even at the time. I bet someone chimes in with the complete story soon, though.
There was a famous news photo that got wide national exposure at the time. The subject of the shot was (I believe) someone or something at a ballgame. In the background crowd were the unidentified hands of one of the attendees. Someone (a doctor?) saw the photo and alerted the media claiming that the guy’s hands or fingernails supposedly indicated that he was at risk for some disease or ailment. As a result there was a minor nationwide manhunt to warn the guy. IIRC, they found him and he was not at risk after all.
heh - my mom is a medical technologist (does bloodwork in a hospital lab - occasionally has to draw it herself, especially in the old days). She used to creep me out by pointing out people with ‘great veins’ and how easy it would be to stick said person (I was one of those people).
Yeah, my wife did that as well. Becoming a nurse pretty much ruined her ability to suspend disbelief when watching ER. The “doctors” would be cracking open someone’s chest, and she’d start shrieking “For God’s sake, they’re not even wearing masks!”
As a software engineer, though, I can relate – as soon as I see a TV or movie character using a computer, usually the whole illusion is shot for me. I can still remember seeing that Sandra Bullock movie The Net, in which her character was developing a supposedly state-of-the-art game program. When they actually show off her game, it was just Wolfenstein 3D, a game that was already three years old (!) when the movie came out. Bam…disbelief no longer suspended.
Computer scenes in the movies tend to bug me, too. In The Net I got a laugh out loud moment when Sandra Bullock inserted a floppy which somehow deleted the world domination software that the bad guys had been developing. Say what? These guys are supposed to be close to controlling the entire world and they didn’t think to do backups?
After 9/11 I heard interviews with many engineers who stated that they were running calculations to try and figure out how long the Towers would stay up before they collapsed. I know that in watching movies I pay close attention to details which relate to jobs I’ve held or interests I have. (Jurassic Park was ruined for me simply by the fact that I used to work in an amusement park, and I knew that they’d never be able to get away with the lack of safety features in the film. Also, satellite phones won’t work inside of a dinosaur, nor can you *69 on a sat phone, nor will dialing *69 on your home phone enable you to get the number of most sat phones.)
When I worked as a tech at a one-hour eyeglasses retailer, I would find myself analyzing people’s eyeglass prescriptions in TV and movies. Which was usually amusing in that they didn’t have any. You’d see a character with big, thick glasses with a 0.0 sphere/0.0 cylinder.
I find myself and my B.S. in physics having difficulty in suspending my disbelief when watching most ‘realistic’ science fiction movies. I think that Armageddon was one of the worst. It just kept accumulating, until after the ‘slingshot’ scene, where they came around the moon to see asteroidlets flying around in all directions in the vicinity of their target, and I finally hit my threshhold. I almost leapt from my seat, yelling, “Where did those all come from! Where are they going! AARGH! This is stupid!!!” Fortunately, I didn’t, as my wife probably would have beaten me into unconsciousness …
When I worked as a tech at a one-hour eyeglasses retailer, I would find myself analyzing people’s eyeglass prescriptions in TV and movies. Which was usually amusing in that they didn’t have any. You’d see a character with big, thick glasses with a 0.0 sphere/0.0 cylinder.
I find myself and my B.S. in physics having difficulty in suspending my disbelief when watching most ‘realistic’ science fiction movies. I think that Armageddon was one of the worst. It just kept accumulating, until after the ‘slingshot’ scene, where they came around the moon to see asteroidlets flying around in all directions in the vicinity of their target, and I finally hit my threshhold. I almost leapt from my seat, yelling, “Where did those all come from! Where are they going! AARGH! This is stupid!!!” Fortunately, I didn’t, as my wife probably would have beaten me into unconsciousness …
The GQ forum is for questions with factual answers. This is more of a poll, which might make it eligible for IMHO, but it’s about television, so I think Cafe Society is better.
