Doctors pour scorn on China's medical TV shows: point out five most egregious mistakes

by Michael Woodhead
One of China's most popular TV shows is the medical drama "Young Doctors". Modelled on similar hugely popular shows from Korean TV, the show is all about the lives and loves of a handful of beautiful, smart and successful young doctors. 
China's real young doctors are not impressed - but they are laughing. On the medical social media site DXY. net they have been pointing out the many ridiculous factual errors and goofs in the show. The top five are:

1. Hand hygiene howler: Ming Ming has donned sterile gloves but then adjusts her glasses - an obvious no-no from an infection control point of view

2. Scans all wrong: - holding X-ray pictures the wrong way round - pointing to a chest X-ray and and diagnosing a broken leg, looking for pneumonia in a CT scan of the head ...

3. White coat wearing - on the TV show, doctors never button up their white coats, but wear them open and flapping like fashionable casual wear.

4. Novel medical theories: mahjong can prevent Alzheimers, people wake up from prolonged vegetative state.

5. Miracle patients: man with tracheal obstruction on breathing machine can speak quite clearly with beautiful dialogue.

However, China's medics are more impressed with the other medical drama The Obstetrician. Written by a playwright, it is nevertheless quite authentic as it relies on real cases histories and the scriptwriters consulted medical professionals over the technical details.

Anything on telly? "The Obstetrician"

by Michael Woodhead
Writer Zhang Zuomin is proud of his new TV series "The Obstetrician" which airs tonight on Jiangsu TV.
He says it is different from the usual medical soap operas focused on romantic liaisons in the hospital - this one is authentic and focused on the medical cases and technical details, he says. Zhang isn't a doctor but he says the dialogue is authentic based on his experience of working in a hospital as a security guard before he went to Fudan University to study Chinese.  He says the TV series focuses on real medical cases and is realistic down to the drug doses used and the medical procedures as described in the medical journals. When working in a hospital Zhang said he noticed that doctors have their own jargon, quite unlike the official language used in textbooks. He has adopted this in the script and says he wanted to show the real day-to-day working life of doctors rather than focus on trivial affairs and melodramatics. Zhang says he became frustrated watching other medical TV dramas on TV as they were phoney. To add extra authenticity he got a doctor friend to review each script and make suggestions. The drama and tension comes more from the conflicts in the medical cases, although the relationships between doctors are also important as they often have different approaches and opinions on medical cases, he says.