TV teaches medical ethics

A study in the latest issue of The American Journal of Bioethics says 80 per cent of medical and nursing students watch television medical dramas. All that's available online of the study is an abstract, but it gives some tantalizing details.

"Viewing of television medical dramas is a social event and many students discuss the bioethical issues they observe with friends and family. Television medical dramas may stimulate students to think about and discuss bioethical issues."

I have heard many in the medical and ethics fields complain that our medical schools do not do enough to emphasize ethics in the curriculum.

Could this be a symptom of that? It would seem that the students, at least, are interested in discussing the issue.

Comments

[deana]

I wonder what the article's intended message is?

Publication = decision to publish. Study/survey = attempt at credibility. The two together = motive.

If it's a journal of bioethics shouldn't the authors be lamenting the fact that students have to go to fictional situations to have their awareness tweaked? Does the article mean to imply that students are so driven to help others that they crave instruction, any instruction, as to how to do it?

I doubt this very much. My view (and here it comes...) is that students watch TV shows to see themselves glamorized and enjoy their advertizement-style ability (more than anyone else in society) to be brilliant and special enough to make value judgments about others.

Because it is totally without logic that a prestigious journal emanating from a discipline itself, be so forthcoming as to state that it doesn't really exist, the goal must be elsewhere.

I figure this journal is telling us that the goal of hospitals is to become big TV sets with doctors being stars and starlets in the field of human judgment and to heck with medicine. Medicine exists now only for those who deserve it or click into an overarching plan.

Doctors and nurses are to be seen by the public as irrepressible genuises, sexy, steamy, god-like idols. The show "House" is the primer.

Of course, this is all very disturbing but with the victims dead and family testimony discredited who will care. The show must go on.