TV Medical Dramas And Medical Students
Medicine is a highly prestigious career. People believe that restoring human health is both difficult and important, which is why we are impressed by those who do it routinely.
Because it’s so difficult and important, training to be a doctor is proportionately gruelling. To qualify, you need an excellent brain, an excellent ability to stay calm under pressure, and an excellent ability to get along with your fellows – even when everybody is exhausted, frazzled, and stressed.
Taking A Break
Precisely because the pressure is so intense, when they take a break from working hard, medical students typically also know how to play hard. One of the things those hard-working medical students enjoy the most is watching tv – and especially tv medical dramas.
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Popular Medical Dramas
One of the most popular TV medical dramas of all time is Grey’s Anatomy.
In this series, Dr Meredith Gray starts her career as a junior doctor at the Grey Sloan Memorial hospital. As the series progresses, a number of dramatic injuries and illnesses push the team to their limits – from a personal point of view as well as a professional one.
Viewing habits
In Weaver & Wilson’s 2014 study, medical students were found to watch most films, and medical dramas were the least-watched category. In contrast, seven years later, Cambra-Badii et al. found that almost all medical students watched medical dramas, which were their favourite programs.
Beneficial Effects Of Viewing Medical Dramas
In a study by Lee & Taylor (2014) found that most students watched tv as a social activity, for relaxation, or for entertainment. However, in Cambra-Badii et al.’s 2021 study, a new reason emerged: students now considered medical dramas a good source of medical information.
Increasing Enrolment
One of the claims made in Kendal & Diug’s 2017 book, Teaching Medicine and Medical Ethics Using Popular Culture, is that medical tv dramas provide a wealth of information about health practices and ethics. According to these authors, watching these dramas about characters in the medical profession makes young people more likely to register for degrees in medicine, nursing, and related health sciences.
Teaching Medical Ethics
The popularity of these series – and how seriously the students take them – could allow the series to help teach med students important lessons about professionalism and ethical issues. Cambra-Badii et al. found that the events in the series that the students remembered the most clearly were patient deaths, medical errors, and inappropriate conduct on the part of the doctors.
Teaching Rare Conditions
Additionally, medical dramas were a good way of exposing students to rare diseases and conditions they would be unlikely to encounter in their actual practices – and viewing realistic portrayals of these conditions was more helpful than just reading about them.
Final Word
Watching these programs is an enjoyable and relaxing activity – not like studying – but still helps to get important medical information across. Moreover, medical students already have this strong interest in TV dramas and want to be like the characters they admire, so if those characters act in an ethical way, that will rub off on the students.
