Highly recommended medical show: "Mystery Diagnosis". (Discovery Health)

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

Basically each show takes 3 vignettes of people who had some kind of medical problem that went undiagnosed or misdiagnosed for extended periods of time, and relates their experience and how they finally came to have their problem diagnosed. It's interesting and I learn something from every episode.

Some of the problems they have covered are actually not that rare (like gout), others extremely rare (genetic enzyme deficiency causing metabolic problems). Some people have taken many years to have their problem properly diagnosed.

It's a good ego stroke for me, because it seems that on each show there's at least one of the problems that I'm able to nail almost right away, and I don't even work in a diagnostic type of medicine. I recognize that the way the problem is presented and framed on the show often highlights the key diagnostic issues, an advantage the initial doctors did not have, who have to sort through all the "noise" to find the important facts, and don't always succeed. But sometimes I really do wonder about the medical care some of these people have received, it just seems that some of the docs they have seen are just not very careful or thorough...

One of the obvious lessons from the patient histories on the show is the importance of being persistent, and keep getting a new doc if you feel that something is definitely wrong that is being overlooked or "gaffed off" by the doc. That doesn't mean that sometimes the doc isn't right, but if you know your own body best and know something's wrong, you must be your own advocate.

The other show that I think is pretty good is "Trauma: Life in the E.R." because, aside from the smells, it does a good job conveying the essence of what trauma emergency care is actually like, especially since the footage is real, and not bogus reenactments etc. Also, very important, it does a pretty good job of showing the followup on the cases that don't go well, where the patient ultimately dies or winds up paralyzed or brain damaged. This is the reality of what we do, and it doesn't shy away from it (which is one thing I HATED about shows like MASH or Doogie Howser or whatever, where I felt the positive outcomes were WAY overemphasized compared to reality). "Trauma" also does a good job of conveying a sense of the lifestyles and personalities of the various nurses and docs involved. My "game" is to try to see how quickly I can identify the region/city/hospital involved in the particular show (do the staff or patients have Southern accents, etc.), or see if the place is somewhere I have actually worked, or if any of the people on the show are someone I know (the world of medicine is much smaller than you might think).

http://health.discovery.com/tvlistings/series.jsp?series=112261&gid=0&channel=DHC

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

1. kick for a gr8 show