<p>How accurate is it in portraying a residency?</p>
<p>The most obvious complaint is that there would be a lot more physicians running around -- usually you only see JD's class of interns, Cox and Wen (2 attendings), and Kelso (the chief of medicine). Of course, it's not as if the hospital only admits residents once every four years. There would be residents one year older than JD, one year younger than JD, etc.</p>
<p>This would seriously throw off the social dynamics of the show. JD would get much less time with Cox or any other single attending, and he would have taken on a teaching role very early on. There would be younger "Newbies" running around constantly.</p>
<p>Episode 1x07 (?) also implies that Sacred Heart has medical students, but these are never heard from again.</p>
<p>I'm no resident, so this could be wrong, but it does seem like Scrubs accurately shows the time commitment required by residents based on what i have heard and read in these forums. The characters are constantly waking up at ridiculous hours in order to get over to the hospital, and its usually pretty late by the time they leave as well. Scrubs also shows that money is tight for most residents (characters often looking for roommates to split rent costs. There was also an episode about stealing supplies from the hospital, which was very funny btw.)</p>
<p>Obviously, there are flaws, as BDM pointed out. They have to have that constant source of drama that makes a good TV show.</p>
<p>My kids watch it and I have seen only a little, so I may be mistaken about the my impressions of how it deviates from reality. </p>
<p>Real residents find their lives consumed by their training in a way that I have not seen on Scrubs, and that would be difficult to reproduce on TV. They spend so much time thinking about medical details, and talking about them, that it would make for pretty boring television- the viewers would not understand it. </p>
<p>Patients conditions evolve more slowly and sometimes you never figure out what was wrong, even if they get better. </p>
<p>Residents get much more involved in the patients care, and less involved in their lives. </p>
<p>Residents have much less "hanging out and doing nothing" time than on the show. Remember the current rules limiting resident work hours to 80 per week (100 for surgical residents) are controversial among the senior physicians who determine the residents' lives, and the rules are often broken. </p>
<p>Residents spend a lot of their time away from the hospital studying. Again, try to make a TV show about a bunch of people sitting down reading books until they fall asleep.</p>
<p>The relationship between the residents and faculty is closer on the show than in reality. In the real world, this is a professional relationship, not a family. The staff docs do have lives, more so than the residents, and their lives do not revolve around the hospital nearly as much.</p>
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They spend so much time thinking about medical details, and talking about them, that it would make for pretty boring television- the viewers would not understand it.
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<p>Hell, medical students do that...along with making jokes only other medical students would get, finding the only other medical student in a crowded bar to talk shop with, not having a clue what is going on in the lives of the people who used to be your closest friends, getting excited about things that everyone else finds disgusting like performing colonoscopies, waking up in the middle of the night to take your significant other's (or shacker's) pulse...and so on.</p>
<p>Also, the 80 work week is not specialty dependent. It's 80 hours (averaged over a 4 week period) everywhere, period.</p>
<p>The only exception I've ever heard of is that it's 88 for neurosurgery. It's 80 across the board everywhere else.</p>
<p>Of course, that rule is pretty widely broken.</p>
<p>There's the 10% rule, but programs have to prove that they can't provide the appropriate instructional program without the extra time...that's a program by program exception I believe</p>
<p>they always portray the surgeons as "jocks" who are mechanical and know little about other aspects of medicine. any truth to that?</p>
<p>To a small extent. Obviously there's some embellishment for comedy's sake. </p>
<p>Real surgeons do need to be aware of the other co-morbidities a patient has, and how that affects the risks of surgery. The two surgeons I've worked closely with so far were both engineering majors in undergrad. I suppose that next week at this time when I start on my first official rotation - which happens to be surgery - I'll have a better idea.</p>
<p>The fact that surgeons "know little about other aspects of medicine" is probably not particularly true, but many of the other cultural stereotypes do have some truth to them.</p>
<p>For example, I greeted another medical student friend over this past week with a high five and a chest bump, and the onlooking radiologist laughed and told us we were going to be future surgeons, whether we knew it or not.</p>