Grey’s Anatomy is a great show to watch that has many sociological themes. I recently started to watch it and I am already on season two. This prompt reminded me of an episode in season 2, episode 5 called “Bring the Pain”. In this episode there are three different cases that they work on that show the actions and interactions of healthcare professionals.
The first case that shows an interaction between patients and doctors is on a patient called Anna Chue. She came in with back pain after her legs started to go numb and after her tests, it showed to be from a spinal tumor. Her parents came in and the doctors, Derek Shepherd and Meredith Grey, told them that she was going to need surgery to remove the tumor. After hearing that, her father said she was not going to have the surgery and instead go home, and Anna agreed with her father, although the consequences of not getting the surgery would be that she would be paralyzed within 24 hours. When Meredith talked to Anna to try to get her to agree to the surgery, she told her that she was Hmong and since her father was an elder, she had to agree to what her father said. Her father did not want her to get the surgery because he believed her sickness to be caused by one of her souls being missing and before surgery she had to have a Shaman healing ritual. In the end the doctors helped them by flying in their Shaman by helicopter to treat Anna. After the ritual, they took Anna in for surgery where they took out the tumor.
We can see how the doctors reacted in a good way, trying to understand their patients more and meet their needs to be able to care for them. Many doctors do not understand peoples cultural beliefs and don’t treat them as well as they could because of this.
Another example is when George and Alex get stuck in the elevator during a power outage in Seattle Grace with a wounded police officer. As time passed the patient kept getting worse, and one of the doctors, Preston Burke, told them that they needed to perform the surgery in the elevator in order to save his life. Alex froze and wasn’t able to do it so George stepped in, although he had never performed open heart surgery by himself before. Dr. Burke guided him through the surgery until it was complete and the firefighters got them out of the elevator.
This also shows how these doctors do anything and everything int heir power to keep their patients alive and well. Although the intern, George, didn’t know how to do an open heart surgery, with the help of his superior doctor, he was able to stabilize the police officer and keep him alive in a difficult time.
The last example is of a patient with pain that the doctor, Derek Shepherd, prescribed him to watch adult films in order to relieve his pain. In the beginning Cristina was horrified by this patient and how he watched it in the hospital but he told him it was prescribed by the doctor. This caused Cristina to believe his pain was fake and didn’t treat him as well as she should of been. Because of the power outage, he couldn’t continue to watch and his pain came back, this is when Cristina realized that his pain was actually real and what he was watching was actually helping him with his pain. This led her to improvise in a clever way and use her story telling skills to relieve his pain until the power came back.
This example is important because being in pain is hard for doctors to understand sometimes since they cannot see it. Doctors might believe the patient or not, like in this case. There is a very fine line between not believing them and hurting the patient because lack of quick care can lead to worse outcomes. This part of the episode was kind of funny because of the type of person and doctor Cristina is but it shows she really cares for her patients and does even what she doesn’t feel comfortable doing for the sake of her patients.
These three examples show how unique each interaction with patients and doctors are and how prepared they must really be in any occasion. It shows how sometimes doctors might not be right or flawed since they are still people and can make mistakes. Personally I find that Grey’s Anatomy is really interesting in the different cases that they look at in the show. Have you ever seen an episode of Grey’s Anatomy? What did you think of it?
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