Evaluation of Medical Accuracy in Grey’s Anatomy

Anyone familiar with Grey’s Anatomy will agree that the show is over dramatized. The show writer, Shonda Rhimes, tries to add more drama to the show to make it more interesting. The show can be misleading on how hospitals run. Although it has not been studied, there are many social media posts about how Grey’s Anatomy has made people want to go into the medical field. Many of those people know the show is not necessarily what goes on in the real world. But there are people who are confident in their knowledge about the medical field when the show is not medically accurate.

Grey’s Anatomy is a long running medical drama that first premiered in 2005. It shows medical professional’s crazy lives in Seattle Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital. The pilot episode “A Hard Day’s Night” is based on the lives of 5 new interns Meredith, Christina, Izzie, Alex, and George on their first 48 hour call shift. The episode shows all the drama and difficult times the interns face on their first day.

The episode starts with all the interns meeting and talking to each other until their resident, Miranda Bailey, calls all of them over. That’s when Bailey gives her interns a tour of the hospital and explains the basic rules. After Bailey finishes her tour she gets a page so her and her inters all run to the roof to meet the chopper transporting a patient who is having seizures. When the patient is placed in a room another doctor, Preston Burke, orders the interns to do all the basic test (shotgun). A doctor and a famous youtuber, Doctor Mike, who says “That is not how medicine works, the shotgun approach is every ineffective.” “When you are ordering test you should already have a diagonsic in mind so that your test confirm them” Since the doctors already knew the girl was having seizures it was unnecessary to order all of those test.

On his first shift George performs a simple procedure. Burke was supervising him and started getting a little impatient and took over the procedure. George tells Burke he probably messed up a lot when he was learning too. So far all the residents have been rude to all the interns. They are treating the interns like they are nothing. But according to Doctor Mike all those doctors in real hospitals respect that you come in wanting to learn. All the doctors want to help their interns learn and become good doctors.

Even after his first procedure, Burke picks George to scrub into another surgery. All the other interns are in the gallery placing bets on how long it will take him to mess something up. In the episode you just see George taking an appendix out while Burke stands over top of him. Burke is not seen helping him until George accidentally breaks the purse strings. This mess up is how George gets his long running nickname 007, which means license to kill. In reality the whole time the surgeon and the intern would be having a conversation about the surgery and how to correctly do the surgery. The surgeon will also ask you hard questions to make sure you understand what you are doing.

When Izzie needed to give her patient Mr. Jones antibiotics she was having problems because he had junky veins. She was talking to one of the nurses at a nursing station how she should start a central line but she doesn’t know how. Since she can not start the line she wakes up Bailey, who is not happy to be woken up. Since I have been in hospitals before, I find it funny that the nurse laughed at Izzie for not being able to start an antibiotic when it is the nurse’s job.

The seizure patient from earlier, Katie, was assigned to Meredith. Towards the night when Meredith walked into Katie’s room she found she was having multiple seizures. She quickly told the nurses to page Bailey and Derek Shepherd, the head of neurology. Meredith tried to give Katie medicine to try and stop the seizures, but she started to flatline. When none of that worked she shocked her and Katie’s heartbeat went back to normal. Christina and Meredith both figured out that Katie probably has an aneurysm.

Doctor Shepherd confirms that Katie does have an aneurysm and he congratulates Christina and Meredith on figuring it out. Before Katie’s surgery Shepherd picks Meredith to scrub in on the surgery, because she helped figure out the problem. Christina gets mad at Meredith, because she knows about Derek and Meredith's relationship. Meredith decides she does not want to scrub in, because she thinks Derek is just picking her because of their relationship.

Through out the whole series of Grey’s Anatomy relationship drama plays a big part in the plot. It starts in the pilot with Meredith and Derek. When their relationship first started, they had no idea who each other was. When Meredith found out Derek was her boss she called the relationship inappropriate. Through out the rest of the episode Derek was trying to get Meredith to go out with him again. While in Grey’s Anatomy lots of relationships do happen in the hospital Doctor Mike agrees that they are inappropriate and that they really don’t happen often.