I’ve watched only one episode of “Grey’s Anatomy“–because the spectacle of watching doctors who could be operating on me tomorrow having adulterous sex in what were supposed to be patient consulting rooms proved a bit much.


It wasn’t so much that it strained the bounds of morality. Worse, it strained the bounds of credulity. Or at least I hope that’s not the way it was when I had minor surgery at my local university hospital a couple of weeks ago. That episode of “Grey’s” also featured an in-ward prom (yes, you read that right, a high-school prom in honor of the chief of surgery’s cancer-stricken daughter, a patient), in which all the comely young doctors got dolled up in tuxes and evening gowns and waltzed around the surgical equipment under a disco ball–until the fiance of one of the youthful surgeons, also a patient at the hospital, upped and died–whereupon she climbed into the hospital bed with his corpse, evening gown and all. No, I don’t think so, I said to myself.


That episode that had me resolving “never again!” for “Grey’s” involved a heart transplant–to that very fiance. The story was that he had been on a waiting list for that transplant–so his doctor-girlfriend, an intern at the hospital, fudges around with his medical records to make him sicker in order to move him to the list’s very top, ahead of several other people even worse off than he. As you can imagine, such conduct is an extraordinary breach of medical ethics, not to mention lawsuit-generator if, say, the folks bumped down the translplant list ever found out. The hospital conducted an investigation, but all the rest of the beautiful young interns–who knew perfectly well what happened and even gave her a hand–played “I Am Spartacus” and kept mum, thwarting the investigators and playing them for fools. Then, the fiance, after doing well with his new heart for a couple of days, suddenly did the flat EKG thing. Hence the scene with the evening gown and the corpse–played for high pathos.


Fortunatelly, there are a few others out there who were not enthralled by this display of love and friendship before duty. Here is Peter Brown, a recipient of a liver transplant and knows well how scarce the number of organs are relative to those who need them, writing for RealClearPolitics:


“And, the show’s message that it is perfectly normal, and to some degree acceptable, for people in a position to decide who lives and who dies to give preference to their personal emotions over the law and medical ethics is profoundly disturbing….


The show’s failing is that it gives the inaccurate impression that the transplant process is capricious, can be easily manipulated and if so, what’s the harm, since it’s to help a friend.”


As Brown points out, in real life, criminal charges as well as termination of her medical career would probably be the fate of the young intern, and the hospital could lose its license to perform transplants. But on “Grey’s Anatomy,” the chief of residents is already lobbying to bring the young doctor (who has quit her internship) back to the hospital, where she can rejoin her intern friends and accomplices (who suffer no reprisals whatsoever). As Brown writes:


“That is a shame. Television doesn’t have to replicate real life. But when a drama, not an obvious farce like Scrubs, suggests crime can be without consequences, it is as dangerous to the public good as when it glorifies sex and violence.”


So “Grey’s” isn’t just absurd–it teaches some very bad lessons.