We were watching an episode of one of our favorite shows in which a doctor was treating a diabetic for another condition. He wrote on the chart that the guy was not to be given steroids. A PA in the hospital missed the chart notation and gave him both IV and oral steroids, and he went into a coma. The doctor went ballistic and raised hell.
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Unusual. What show was that?
It’s a miracle! What show?
“Royal Pains”
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Thought so…I saw that one—also stunned!
Which season and episode? Trying to find it.
It was somewhere in season 3; already sent back the disc so I’m not sure which one. Sorry.
Thank you so much, David. Now I might have to watch quite a few episodes in season 3…
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So we should be happy that some idiot gave him steroids and he went into a coma ??? How about it they followed directions and he was ok- I guess that wouldn’t be exciting tv 
They broke one of the Iron Laws of Hollywood, Diabetic Subsection: “If there’s a diabetic on the show, that guy’s gonna need a shot!” How dare they!
Snark aside, it’s actually better that they DID feature this. Not everyone–including PWDs as well as medical professionals–are aware that steroids are a huge no-no for us. I certainly wasn’t, and neither was the orthopedist, when I was given a cortisone shot that blew my BG through the roof for three weeks. In that sense it’s great that the show gets this information out there.
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I wasn’t celebrating the plot line, rather the accuracy of the way diabetes was depicted and the absence of stereotypes. Seeing that on TV is like coming across an oasis in the desert.
Anyway, mistakes like that DO happen in the real world. Doctors are among the leading causes of death.
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Wrong! The vast majority of people who die after receiving medical care were working on dying before they saw a doctor.
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I’m referring to mistakes, not preexisting conditions.
As reported in JAMA, the deaths caused by the diagnosis, manner and treatment of doctors “constitutes the third leading cause of death in the United States, after deaths from heart disease and cancer.”
That’s not me saying it. Please don’t shoot the messenger. 
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No shots fired, especially not at you, David.
But one must take into consideration the fact that without medical care, most of these folks would have died anyway or would have had a poor quality of life during their limited time remaining on this earth. My point: physicians are not miracle-workers. We cannot prevent death. No one dies “from old age”; eventually, everyone dies from something. And because many people seek medical care near the end of their journey, the odds of said people dying on our watch are pretty high.
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I cannot open the JAMA link for some reason, but if this is like other similar studies that popped up on Google when I searched, these studies seem to be a review of the medical system rather than doctors, despite sensational newspaper headlines that imply the latter.
Also, as is constantly pointed out here, one must remember that correlation ≠causation.
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And what’s wrong with the medical system (at least here in the U.S.) is that physicians cannot so much as fart these days without the permission of the almighty health insurer. And then we have to wait for that pre-approval to s-l-o-w-l-y trickle down through the system before we can take any action (otherwise our patients end up footing the entire bill), and by then it’s sometimes too late to prevent a less-than-stellar outcome.
All good points, but I have to address this one just from the standpoint of logic:
Obviously true, but it misses a critical distinction. The point I was getting at was not the inevitability of death, but rather its cause and timing. Health care professionals (not just doctors) are people. They do make mistakes when they’re tired, overworked, or stretched too thin. And sometimes even when they’re not, as witness the fictional incident depicted in Royal Pains.
If someone receives the correct treatment that could have potentially lengthened life, but then is the victim of a mistake that has the reverse effect, then “do no harm” has been violated, albeit with the best of good intentions.
Then perhaps not seeking medical care is the answer.
Please everyone, continue your physician-bashing in peace. I’m out.
I can’t let that go. This isn’t bashing. Identifying a problem is a mandatory precursor to fixing it. If our medical system is seriously broken in various ways—which I hope we can all agree it is—then correctly identifying the things that are wrong is an absolute prerequisite to correcting them. The chance of fixing what doesn’t work may be slim, but if it’s not correctly identified, it’s zero.
For the record, I have been a programmer for 46 years, and programmers get tarred and feathered relentlessly by most everyone who has ever used a PC—very often justifiably. And I don’t even work on PCs, never have. It just is what it is.
I think, in this case, the problem is the system. Not the individual physicians working within that system. Saying things like, “Doctors are among the leading causes of death” places blame squarely on individual doctors. The blame belongs on various other aspects of the medical system.
I’m a teacher and have bowed out of teacher-bashing threads on other sites for similar reasons. People take their frustrations with the education system, their one bad experience with an individual teacher, and their complete lack of knowledge about what is actually involved in teaching, and make statements like, “Teachers are lazy and incompetent” which is just not true. All the more frustrating because everyone has benefitted from the work of teachers. Teachers and doctors are not the same, obviously, but I do feel the two professions share similarities in terms of how they are viewed by society. If you replaced “teacher” with “doctor” in the above statements, all would still hold true of that profession as well.
Maybe I’m not hanging out in the right circles, but I have rarely, if ever, seen programmers get bashed. I have seen companies and products get bashed, but not any broad, sweeping, generalized statements that bash programmers as a profession. I think one difference might be that many people have no idea what’s involved in being a programmer. But everyone has seen a doctor or a teacher “do their work” (at least the small part that’s visible) and assumes that they must therefore know what the entire job entails and are justified in making sweeping judgements.