The Portrayal of Doctor-Patient Communication in Televisual Media: How realistic are they?

Television is a part of the lives of many people. According to Larry Gross and George Gerbner's cultivation theory, the more we watch and live with TV the more it influenced us. . It can change the way we think, talk or even carry out day-to-day actions. How does it influence the way we think about doctors and the way we communicate with them? As time and technology has progressed how has thinking around doctor-patient communication changed and does TV reflect that? In the quest to answer this question I analyzed episodes of House and Grey’s Anatomy and compared it to literature on doctor patient communication from three different time periods: 1950-1970, 1971-1990, and 1991-present. Additionally, I conducted a focus group where I asked Swarthmore College students their opinion about the realism of doctor-patient communication in an episode of Greys Anatomy. The results showed that the correlation between the TV shows, the literature and focus group depended on what time period the literature was from and particular opinions of the focus group. Thus it cannot be explicitly stated that the TV episodes viewed were realistic with respect to current college student’s opinion and recent literature because there were aspects of the episodes that reflected various themes across time periods