Grey's Anatomy Vs Real life-Ahana

Grey’s Anatomy has earned itself a reputation of being an insanely dramatic medical show. Honestly even a die-hard fan, like myself, will find it nearly impossible to keep up with the crazy love lives of our beloved characters and the mind boggling, head spinning plotlines the show has to offer.

To an outsider, Grey’s anatomy is simply a raunchy, over-hyped medical drama about a bunch of (unnecessarily good looking) doctors and surgeons navigating their way through life and the world of medicine at Seattle Gr- oops, Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital. It follows the lead, Meredith Grey (played by Ellen Pompeo), as she rises through the ranks, from intern to resident to an attending. However real fans know that the show is an emotional torture device, delivering to us heart wrenching, soul-crushing and mind-numbing moments for 50 minutes every week, for the past 16 years. At this point, my tear ducts are programmed to unleash a cascade of tears every time I watch a new episode and I’m sure there are many like me who take part in this masochistic ritual.

My love for the show knows no bounds, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I would readily tune in to watch Grandma Meredith become the Chief of Surgery, bossing around interns a third her age. But loving also means tolerating flaws and the show has one too many to overlook.

It is completely understandable that the show has to diverge from realism at times in order to engage its audience and keep them coming for more. But you cannot ignore the blatant glamorization of doctors and their lives. By portraying the residents’ lives as exciting, dramatic whirlwinds, the show makes real-world residency seem less difficult. There are several instances within the show that would probably never happen in real life.

Firstly, everyone seems to be sleeping with everyone else! Now don’t get me wrong, I ship MerDer as much as the next person, but in a real life workplace, this is unlikely to happen, in fact it is actively discouraged in most hospitals.

Secondly, what’s quite bizarre is that residents are often allowed to perform complicated, risky surgeries without an attending in the OR. In real life you’d probably die if you had a relatively inexperienced surgeon handling a risky procedure by themselves. Residents are given so much autonomy in the show, it’s actually scary. In reality they’d have to run everything they do to an attending physician.

Thirdly, and I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, but doctors on the show do tend to get quite close to their patients, getting so emotionally invested in their treatment. From Izzie and Denny to Teddy and Henry, the examples are countless.

Furthermore, the show definitely makes it seem as though there is constant rivalry and competition between fellow interns and colleagues and that they need to outperform everyone else in order to be ‘No.1’, when in truth there is a lot more camaraderie present. More often than not people tend to support each other - there is often an atmosphere of trust and collaboration within a batch of newbies.

I’ve just scratched the depth of where the show goes awry. But a part that I absolutely have to mention is the notion that the show perpetuates- that nurses don’t really contribute much in a hospital. This is probably one of the biggest myths in television. In former CNN medical correspondent’s Andrew Holtz’s words, ‘Nurses are absolutely essential to health care. What you see on TV is mostly nursing care. Giving patients injections, making sure they have their medicine, taking their blood pressure and doing hands-on things with the patient in the hospital room, that’s almost all nursing care.”

Look, reading this, you’re probably questioning whether I truly love the show, but I am just a practical critic. You cannot ignore several of the medical inaccuracies the show portrays, but that doesn’t mean you should stop watching.

It is just important to keep in mind that not everything you see is actually true and we shouldn't base our expectations of what a real hospital is like from what we see on the show. We don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy to be educated. We watch it for entertainment value.