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In a study reported in Rodale News.com, "…researchers screened all episodes of the highest-rated medical dramas, including Grey's Anatomy, House M.D., and Private Practice, and the last five seasons of ER. In the nearly 330 episodes, 59 seizures occurred, most of them [at the fictional hospital. ... Major seizure first aid no-nos [administered by the shows' medical personnel] -- including holding the seizing person down, trying to stop movement, or putting something in the person's mouth -- occurred 46 percent of the time. In contrast, proper first aid for seizures was shown just 29 percent of the time.”
According to the report, "Everybody watches TV and everybody watches popular shows, so they may get a misconception of not only the illness, but also the proper intervention and treatment."
You ain't just whistling Dixie!
Since the beginning of TV, hospital shows have always taken dramatic license. After all, ‘it is entertainment programming,’ the argument went. That was always a facile defense or rationale and maybe justified not paying for consultants or the writer or shower runner not wasting time and money during some authenticating research.
In one early series, Ben Casey, I recall that it seemed as though every third person rolling into the hospital was diagnosed with a subdural hematoma. It sounded official, sounded medical, and who in the audience really knew the incidence of such a determination in actual hospital ERs? What difference would it make, anyway. So what if hematoma were over-represented?
Good question. How accurate must procedural dramas be? Consider: Do doctors really break into a patient’s home to determine if the reason for the undiagnosable condition of the unconscious or disoriented patient, is a kitchen full of illicit and toxic chemicals and that such chemicals could account for multi-orifice bleeding? According to House, it seems, it happens every other Tuesday.
And really, how often during a single shift are doctors getting it on in any available maintenance closet, unused Critical Care room, resident sleeping quarters or basement boiler room? According to Grey’s Anatomy, every 36 minutes. 
Not accurate? So what. Who cares? Unless, of course you end up going to med school in part for the anticipated sex marathons that will make all the sacrifice worthwhile. Yeah, the money too. But the sex… No kidding, it happens.
If surgeon on a TV show does a tracheotomy incorrectly or intubates someone through the wrong orifice, no big deal since few of us will likely be performing these medical interventions in our lifetime.
But there are times when TV doctors are definitely role models for viewers and those are the wrong times for shows to invoke dramatic license dispensation. People having strokes, seizures, profuse bleeding, concussions, and other, commonplace but serious medical occurrences, should be portrayed and treated as properly and as accurately as possible because someone in the audience will likely be confronted by such an emergency at some point in their life and do what they saw on a show.
And bad role modeling is worse than no role modeling because oftentimes doing nothing is much better than doing something that is quite wrong. Four times in my life I have been obliged to act when a stranger suddenly started to seize in front of me. Once, at a university where I was teaching, a colleague mistook me for a student, pushed me out of the way (clearly to her students were pushable—aarrgh) as I was trying to make a seizing student comfortable and less likely to injure himself. Dr. Pushy took charge and interceded in a way that may have contributed, as we looked on, to the person biting off part of their tongue.
Often TV or film fare provides innocuous, incidental learning. We may learn how lawyers lawyer, doctors treat, psychotherapists therapize, police investigate crimes, and politicians create the sausage we call legislation. We even learn how people act when they’re shot and fall, or what an entry or exit wound looks like, or how someone displays while experiencing a massive coronary -- or we think we’ve learned this. But, we never know when what we’ve learned is proper procedure, accurate depiction or dramatic license, until reality puts us to the test. When we find out it may not be what we bargained for.
Many people learn their versions of reality from fictional portrayals of reality in the media. We would be wiser media producers and consumers if we recognized that benign entertainment for some is serious education for others.
