Hugh Laurie, I'm sorry, but... we're through.

That's it. I can't do it anymore. I'm done with medical shows. They're driving me nuts. It's lawyer shows for me from now on.

The big problem is House. I mean, the man's supposed to be a genius diagnostician but he and his team never generate a differential diagnosis! They just come up with some idea, and then run with it. Then, when it inevitably turns out to be wrong, they come up with another idea and run with that. And on, and on... Does that sound logical, organized, or safe? In a recent episode, they decided a patient had lymphoma based on the fact that he was itchy. (Without even looking at the area of skin that was itching, I might add.) So, they did the next logical thing: they took him into surgery to take out his spleen. While in surgery, they realized it wasn't lymphoma. So then -- and only then -- did they run and wait for results of the blood tests that revealed that patient did not have lymphoma. Does that make sense to you? Do the surgery before the routine blood tests? Based on itching???

And so many of the "brilliant" breakthroughs that Dr. House makes in each episode are "astute" observations at the bedside when he finally deigns to visit the patient. Funny story: if you actually do a good history and physical on your patient when s/he first comes in, it might not actually take the whole episode to figure out what's going on! Arrrrrrrrrgh.

And then there's stuff like the case of Wilson's disease which they missed because they didn't run a Ceruloplasm (the standard blood test), but which they finally caught because the patient had blue nailbeds under her bloodred nail polish. If they had generated a differential for the patient's symptoms, Wilson's would have been a "can't miss" and they should have run that relatively simple test right away. I watched that episode the same day we had covered Wilson's and other liver diseases in GI small group, and it just drove me up the wall. The dramatic conclusion left me screaming at the television. That's not supposed to happen when I'm watching my stories -- only when I'm watching sports.

The new season of Scrubs is OK. It speaks the emotional truth about med school, and its absurdist angle gives a lot of leeway to bend the logistical truth. I give them the benefit of the doubt that at another med school, in another dimension, things could work that way. They don't actually practice medicine, so it doesn't bother me too often.

From now on, I'm switching to lawyer shows. I don't know nearly enough about the law to let the fudgings in the name of poetic license, the inaccuracies, and the occasional flagrantly absurd moment get in the way of my enjoyment. The Good Wife is good. And so far, The Deep End is very promising; the cast is attractive, at least. I like looking at pretty people. :)