One episode, Dr. Bailey walks into the operating room where a young boy was having a tumor removed from his brain. She waltzes in the room, and when the neurosurgeon, Dr. Shepherd, says they have to wake up the kid, Bailey responds with, "We're doing awake brain surgery?"
She acted so surprised and clearly had no idea what procedure they were doing. I really hope that if I was having surgery, especially awake brain surgery, everyone helping with the operation would know what is going on. If I knew a surgeon was going to walk in on my surgery, knowing nothing about the operation, and then act shocked when she finds out what it is, I would switch hospitals.
My doctors can't be scared or not know what's going on. It should not be a shock to any doctor who is operating on me.
The doctors and nurses also talk a lot about patients during surgery. If I'm lying naked on a table having strangers cut me open, the last thing I want is for everyone in the room to be talking about me. Not only is it embarrassing, but the surgeons are discussing the patient's life in front of everyone. That should not be allowed.
Another time, one of the interns, Dr. Izzie Stevens, cut a patient's LVAD wire. She also happened to be in love with her patient. Izzie did it to get the patient higher up on the heart transplant list. The patient ended up dying even after receiving a new heart. Izzie was still allowed to be a doctor and practice medicine. She wasn't fired.
Basically, she received no punishments for putting a patient in danger and stealing an organ. The patient died from a stroke, but he could have lived a lot longer with the LVAD. The selfish doctor decided that was not good enough for her. I guess the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm means nothing to the doctors at Seattle Grace Hospital.
Illegal acts happen quite often on the show and there are never any consequences. Izzie and Cristina Yang performed an autopsy on a man whose family specifically said no to it. They went against the family's wishes and did it anyway. Were the doctors sued? No. Were they still allowed to practice medicine? Yup.
They got nothing more than a slap on the wrist and told to not do it again. I'm pretty sure that's not how that works, and at the very minimum, they should lose their license to practice medicine. But on this show, you can get away with murder and you will still have a job. It makes zero sense.
Seattle Grace Hospital is a teaching hospital. Fine, I get that everyone starts out knowing nothing and they have to practice and learn. That does not mean that my body can or should be used as a learning curve or an experiment. On the interns' first day on the job, one of them, Dr. George O'Malley, was given the opportunity to assist on an appendectomy, a fairly common procedure. George did something wrong during the surgery, and instead of the attending, Dr. Burke, stepping in to help, he just watched George fail.
Eventually, he decided he would help out and fixes the situation so the patient did not die. Why did he not help right away? This happens all the time on the show where a new doctor makes a mistake and others don't help because they want them to learn. If I was the patient, I would want someone to make sure mistakes don't happen, but if they do, that someone fixes it immediately.
My body is not used for some new intern to learn how to do his job. This happens all the time on the show, which is very concerning.
On another episode, two interns get stuck in an elevator with a patient who needed an emergency heart surgery right then and there. Dr. Burke tells George to make sure he doesn't cut into the patient's lung or heart. George asks him, "How can I be sure of that?" Burke, head of cardiothoracic surgery at Seattle Grace Hospital, with all of his medical knowledge, brilliantly responds with, "You just have to be sure."
That's probably the most useless piece of advice he could have given George, an intern who was performing heart surgery all by himself. I hope real doctors are more knowledged and helpful than Burke.
Burke makes another genius decision by taking on a surgery that he doesn't know how to perform. So, what does he do? He says he will do the surgery. Once the patient is in the operating room and under anesthesia, Burke joins in on a video call with a surgeon who DOES know how to perform the surgery. The other surgeon is talking him through the surgery step by step.
That seems insane and foolish. I didn't realize that surgeons could just go into surgery not knowing what they are doing. On this show, that is completely acceptable and they just need a "how-to" book open telling them what to do. If I was the patient, I would want someone who knows, without a book or another surgeon who isn't in the room, how to perform the surgery.
The procedure alone was extremely risky, and Burke put the patient even more at risk because he didn't want to say that he had never performed the surgery before. I hope real-life doctors care more about patients than their own pride.
I pray that real-life doctors share zero similarities with these so-called surgeons on "Grey's Anatomy" because those doctors make way too many mistakes to the point where it's very alarming and scary.
