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Televisually Transmitted Disease
- 96 statements
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- 15 referencing feature instances
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In Real Life, when you go to a doctor and explain your symptoms, the first thing the doctor will do is test for the most common diseases that could cause them, and then through thorough testing compare your symptoms with each possible common condition that could cause them until the identity of your ailment is determined. Most of the time, this allows for a quick diagnosis, and the doctor can easily move on to the treatment. If the doctor discovers that the most common diseases are not the culprit, only then will they test for something rare and exotic. Not so on TV. On your average Medical Drama, every disease is super rare, the kind that a real doctor might encounter only once in their whole career. This is partly because viewers are easily bored watching routine medical treatment and need something dramatic, partly because rare diseases can often be topical and trendy, and partly because these shows want to show that the doctor is very smart and can recognise the real cause right away. Said smart doctor is likely to lampshade the rarity of the disease. But it happens so often on TV that there's a recurring slate of diseases that show up across different TV shows, Medical Dramas and otherwise. Such rare diseases are so common on TV, you might think they're transmitted through television. Some of these diseases (or conditions) are: |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease | isPartOf |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_1c7b6907 | type |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_1c7b6907 | comment |
The Dragon Doctors were formed specifically to treat rare diseases — magical diseases. The author has been quoted as saying that since quite a lot of medical dramas just plain make up their ailments, he might as well not bother setting it in the real world. The solutions are always presented in a logical fashion, however. | |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_1d699932 | comment |
Black Jack does this, but much like with House, it makes a certain degree of sense — he's an incredibly skilled, incredibly expensive, unlicensed doctor, so he usually only gets hired by someone who's already failed to find relief from the general medical establishment, usually meaning rare and/or incurable diseases. (When Black Jack is around, you may as well tear the word 'Incurable' out of the dictionary...) There's always a point when rare becomes just plain made up. Lionitis is rare and highly unlikely; a telekinetic fetiform terratoma is just plain impossible (as far as we know). | |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_2275c659 | type |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_2275c659 | comment |
Seen often in House, but justified by the setting: Dr. House specializes in diagnosing rare diseases. Many of his patients have already been seen by other doctors who couldn't explain their symptoms. House seems to get quite a kick out of seeing diseases like this on a regular basis, and he dreads his clinic hours when he has to treat walk-in patients with ridiculously common diseases. He also periodically lampshades all this with the Running Gag, "It's never lupus." (Except that one time that no one acknowledges.) In fact, it would be easier to list the instances where the Patient of the Week did not have a Televisually Transmitted Disease after all: One patient shows up only for Foreman to diagnose him with heatstroke. Then he got progressively worse, and another doctor who specialised in third-world diseases identified it as polio — something all but unknown in the developed world. It turned out that said doctor was poisoning the patient with thallium to mimic the symptoms of polio. All this made Foreman's original diagnosis of heatstroke actually correct. After figuring out what the clearly insane doctor did, House fired him and Foreman called the cops. The episode ends with An Aesop about trusting your own instincts, and those of the guy in charge.note A bit of an odd moral coming from an anarchist, but that's beyond the scope of this page. One patient is a kid who collapsed at a basketball game. Turns out he has genetic mosaicism and everyone considers it as a possibility. Turns out he was just dehydrated, and the contrast dye used for the MRI made things worse due to his impaired kidneys. Foreman once misdiagnosed a woman with a rare disease when she had a simple staph infection. That misdiagnosis killed the patient, and Foreman never quite got over it. House and Cuddy are on an airplane returning from a conference about rare, infectious diseases — and wouldn't you know it, a couple of passengers get sick with similar symptoms. Turns out they had entirely different things wrong with them; one had been scuba diving shortly before and got the bends from the air pressure change, and the other turned out to be pregnant. The doctors' intervention caused several more passengers from psyching themselves out and puking. House is recruited by the C.I.A. to treat an agent who appears to have been targeted by one of their enemies, with another doctor suggesting various exotic poisons like a customized radioactive isotope. House doubts this, and eventually turns out to be right: the agent in question ate a lot of Brazil nuts, and his body was reacting to the selenium overdose. As early as the pilot episode, House explains his philosophy to Foreman: |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_248a0d14 | comment |
One episode of Lie to Me had a suspect with Dissociative Identity Disorder, correctly named and handled with slightly more accuracy than most places. For someone it was called "the holy grail of psychology". | |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_24baa5ad | comment |
Inverted once on Doogie Howser, M.D.: A celebrity came in to the hospital after a trip through third-world countries with an illness none of the doctors recognized immediately. They did tests for all sorts of unusual diseases, until a nurse recognized it as measles, which wasn't recognized solely because immunizations for the disease are nigh-ubiquitous. That's Truth in Television; most doctors in recent decades have never seen an actual live case of measles. | |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_261c8d3f | comment |
Often parodied in The Simpsons: In 'The Mansion Family," Mr. Burns was diagnosed with every disease. In "Blood Feud," Bart's allergies include both butterscotch and imitation butterscotch. The children tend to choose the rarest diseases to falsely call in sick and skip school, like leprosy (Nelson) and spontaneous Tourette's (Bart). Of course, this arises suspicions. The latter episode ends with Bart surviving a wolf attack but having to deny it because Krabappel won't believe him. In another episode, Lisa makes Bart and Homer believe they have leprosy in an attempt to Scare 'Em Straight and help clean the house, but all she achieves is to have Flanders send them to a leper colony in Hawaii. In "The Homer They Fall", Dr. Hibbert diagnoses Homer with "an absolutely unique genetic condition known as Homer Simpson Syndrome", which shields him from feeling most hits to his head. |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_2feff3ce | comment |
Grey's Anatomy did this so often. It featured: A tumor causing a perpetual Raging Stiffie, a condition formally known as priapism, and the reason those ads tell you to call a doctor if you experience an erection lasting longer than four hours. Repeated spontaneous orgasms, a real condition known as persistent sexual arousal syndrome. The doctors actually envy the patient for a bit before she sets them straight about how debilitating it is. It was actually less debilitating on the show than in real life; the show's patient had them ten times a day, whereas real sufferers can experience hundreds. Lionitis, formally craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, essentially a misshapen skull that makes the patient's face mask-like. Vaginal poison oak rash (be careful what you wipe with!) A guy whose penis got caught on the inside of his ex-wife's IUD during sex. Another guy who was a depressed author who ate a book. They had to remove it (or what was left of it) from his stomach. A pair of adults (played by the Sklar brothers) who were conjoined at the spine and both in love with the same woman. The episode went to great pains to point out how completely impossible it would have been to separate them, and then they did it anyway. A girl with VATER (now known as VACTERL) which affected her spine so badly it was at a 90-degree angle. A man who was shot in the chest at point-blank range with a bazooka and managed to survive. A girl who actually has XY chromosomes but is resistant to testosterone. In real life, this is androgen insensitivity syndrome, and it usually doesn't actually cause any medical problems on its own. A woman who had a reaction between her chemotherapy and a herbal supplement turn her blood neurotoxic. A 100% face transplant, so successful that the guy could take off the bandages the same day and had almost no ill effects whatsoever. A patient with clairvoyance. And a brain tumour. A nineteen-year-old encased in cement. A man with a pine tree growing in his lung. Candiru, a toothpick-like fish that lives in the Amazon River which follows ammonia trails and occasionally (and painfully) can lodge itself inside the penis. Guess where they found this one. note In reality, the Candiru identifies its prey by sight, is not attracted to the scent of ammonia or urea, and is physically incapable of actually inserting itself into a human's urethra even if it was. This was something that was known before the series was created but it persists in fiction anyway. Necrotizing fasciitis, commonly known as "flesh-eating bacteria". Not actually that rare (even Scrubs did it at least three times), but not quite as dramatic as this show has it. A super-fat man who dies of his super-fatness. A woman with two uteruses. It can happen (it's called "uterus didelphys"), but usually the patient is not pregnant with two different children from two different men at the same time. A woman pregnant with quintuplets. A woman who was rendered amnesiac and bruised beyond recognition by a giant pylon falling on her face. And she's also pregnant. A man who was rendered bruised beyond recognition and lost all motor skills after pushing a girl out of the way of a bus and getting hit himself. This makes it hard for the doctors to see that it's actually George. A woman rescued from a body of water who's been legally dead for several hours from drowning and hypothermia but recovers. This can happen in real life — EMTs are trained on care for such patients. But in this case, she doesn't even suffer any lasting effects (perhaps because she's the eponymous character). A woman with skin cancer that's spread to her brain and causes hallucinations of a dead love, and who's also Izzy. The main characters certainly provide their friends with a lot of practice. |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_3e5de40b | comment |
Scrubs tended to lampshade the phenomenon, usually contrasting the naive JD with the more experienced Dr. Cox: JD diagnoses a patient with Kuru, a disease confined to Papua New Guinea and transmitted by cannibalism. Dr. Cox berated him for exactly this trope (in his typical Coxian way). Indeed, the disease turns out to be mundane, and even the patient himself makes fun of JD. JD suspects another patient has SARS. Not only does he not have SARS, but the hospital is now required, based entirely on JD's suggestion, to quarantine everyone — who's now unfathomably pissed at him. When a news broadcast starts freaking out about two Hepatitis A cases, the hospital gets overrun with people who think they have it. Cox pretty much says it happens every time: |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_8d814070 | comment |
M*A*S*H didn't do this too often; although it was technically a medical show, it was set in a war zone, so most of the patients they saw had war-related injuries. The most "uncommon" diseases the unit encountered were haemorrhagic fever and malaria; in the latter case, both Klinger and another corpsman had a reaction to the anti-malarial medication they were issued.note Interestingly, it's a bit of a racial thing; Klinger was of Arab descent, and the other patient of African descent. At the time, people of African descent were known to have a reaction, but not people of Arab descent. | |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_97a95fc8 | comment |
Sisters: Both Frankie and Teddy were diagnosed with infertility, even though Teddy had already had a daughter. And Teddy also picked up temporary "hysterical" blindness after seeing her husband die from a car bomb and for no physical reason, something that's pretty much unheard of in real life. | |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_a40a63e6 | comment |
A pair of adults (played by the Sklar brothers) who were conjoined at the spine and both in love with the same woman. The episode went to great pains to point out how completely impossible it would have been to separate them, and then they did it anyway. | |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_a4420d22 | comment |
The Venture Bros. invokes and lampshades this trope in "The Diving Bell vs. the Butter-Glider". When Dr. Venture is unconscious and partially paralyzed, Billy Whelan and Pete White are called in to treat him. Billy immediately points out that the most obvious diagnosis is a stroke, but he also white-boards all manner of other exotic possibilities, including "lazy face", but drawing the line at "gum swallowing". | |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_cb840c8f | comment |
The Sixth Sense included suspicion of Münchausen Syndrome by proxy. Possibly, either the doctor or the writer had been watching too much TV (or both since they were the same guy). | |
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| The Sixth Sense | hasFeature |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_d4efb984 | comment |
The Golden Girls: Dorothy was struck with a strange illness that left her perpetually lethargic. Every doctor she saw, including a specialist in New York, told her she was just getting old and should do something new like get her hair done. But the last doctor she saw correctly diagnosed it as the rare Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. This had apparently happened to one of the producers in real life, which inspired the episode. Only problem is that CFS is a "diagnosis of exclusion", something defined by the lack of every other known cause of fatigue, and that there's no treatment — maybe getting your hair done is the best thing you could do. | |
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| The Golden Girls | hasFeature |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_f31ef35a | comment |
Saijou no Meii features a traumatic cardiac tamponade, one of those conditions known for turning up far more in medical dramas than real life, in the very first story. Again, somewhat excusable as the series' focus is on pediatric medicine and young children are more susceptible to it than adults because their ribs aren't fully developed. | |
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| Televisually Transmitted Disease / int_f6e5bd7f | comment |
As stated under Film, in Repo! The Genetic Opera, we have a spectacular case of Munchausen By Proxy. It's all the more over-the-top since the individual responsible is a physician and the case has lasted for seventeen years! | |
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