Televisually-Transmitted Disease: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

The meaning of the quote above is that real patients usually have common, boring diseases; so when a patient arrives at the hospital, it's those very same common, boring diseases that doctors should check for ''first'', before even considering the remote possibilities of them contracting something rare and exotic.

 

Some of these diseases are:

* Münchhausen's Syndrome: Not that common, but the inherent drama of a patient fooling their doctors has made it a staple of TV. The "by proxy" variant where a parent sickens (or even ''murders'') their children for their doctor's attention, is even rarer, more dramatic, and thus more likely to show up on television.

** The "proxy" variant also makes it useful for criminal shows, as it is not only a disease, but a crime. ''[[Law and Order]]'' has had several, most notably the [[Ripped from the Headlines|Michael Jackson scandal ripoff]] where a woman has her granddaughter pretend to be a victim of said (alleged) molester on top of [[Moral Event Horizon|poisoning her to pretend she has cancer]].

** Many characters with this disorder are portrayed as only have one other personality, but in fact more than half of the people of suffer from it have more than 10 and can have as many as 100 distinct personalities.

* Porphyria: A metabolic disorder that turns your skin light-sensitive and your urine deep red. Tends to turn up in the Halloween episodes of medical shows, as the former effect has led to its association with [[Our Vampires Are Different|vampirism]].

* Amnesia: ''Very'' dramatic, and lets the character start out as ignorant as the audience about what's going on. In comedies, almost any blow to the head causes, and cures, amnesia. Doesn't work ''at all'' the way it's portrayed in fiction.

 

Note that not every common condition on TV is an example of this; some are [[Truth in Television]]. If every other TV child carrying an asthma inhaler looks unrealistic, consider that the rate of childhood asthma in many developed countries is between one in ten and ''one in five''.

 

Related to the [[Million-to-One Chance]]; see also [[You Fail Your Medical Boards Forever]]. No connection to [[Videodrome|that TV show]] that [[Brown Note|literally causes brain tumors]].

{{examples}}

== Anime and Manga ==

* ''[[Black Jack]]'' does this, of course, 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've 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...). Of course, 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

== Literature ==

* [[Maniac Magee]] broke out into a rash when he ate pizza. The spots looked suspiciously like pepperoni.

 

 

* The trope exists, of course, in ''[[House (TV series)|House]]'', but it's [[Justified Trope|somewhat excusable]] there: as Dr. House specializes in diagnosing rare diseases, it's not too unreasonable to assume that the patients with more conventional diseases are being treated by more conventional doctors. Also sometimes averted in House's despised clinic hours, where he must treat walk-in patients, and those patients frequently have common diseases, right down to the common cold. Periodically [[Lampshaded]] with the [[Running Gag]], "It's never lupus."

** House actually references this in the Pilot episode.

'''House:''' Are you in first year of medical school? No. First of all, there's nothing on the CAT scan. Second of all, if this is a horse then the kindly family doctor in Trenton makes the obvious diagnosis and it never gets near this office. }}

** Inverted in an episode where a patient was initially diagnosed with heat stroke, and then got progressively worse. One of the doctors, who used to specialize in third world diseases, diagnosed the patient with polio - a disease which is all but unknown in the developed world. It turns out, the doctor was poisoning the patient with thallium to mimic the symptoms of polio. To make a point. Yes. Clearly the doctor was insane; upon figuring out what he's done, House fired him and Foreman called the cops. It turns out Dr. Foreman's original diagnosis of heat stroke was actually correct. The episode ends with [[An Aesop]] from Dr. House about listening to the guy in charge (Foreman), whom he put in charge because he knows what he's doing ([[An Aesop]] about listening to authority coming from an anarchist is kind of ironic, but that's beyond the scope of this page).

** Also inverted in an episode where a kid with genetic mosaicism collapses at a basketball game. Everyone considers the possibility that it has to do with him being intersexed; turns out he was just dehydrated, and the contrast dye used for the MRI made things worse due to his impaired kidneys.

*** That specific example justifies itself to a certain extent. House was convinced he saw an important symptom just before the crash. So, he combed through almost everyone on the bus looking for someone presenting a mysterious symptom. He happened to find one guy in the group of dozens of people who actually did have an undiagnosed condition with a small symptom (which would have developed eventually, but was not immediately life-threatening in the meantime, especially compared to the bus crash).

** One time, actually {{spoiler|it ''was'' lupus.}} [[Fanon Discontinuity|But nobody ever seems to remember it.]]

** Dr. Cox actually fully describes this trope in his rant, saying that the patient is probably just experiencing ordinary disease with unordinary symptoms. Of course, he's right.

** And also averted in ''[[Scrubs]]'', where a news broadcast goes out about two Hepatitis A cases. The hospital is then crushed with people thinking they have it.

** Tumor causing penis to stay erect (priapism)

** Girl who can't stop experiencing spontaneous orgasms

** Man's penis piercing getting caught on the inside of his ex-wife's IUD during sex.

** Lionitis

*** Embarrassing, but it happens. Be careful what you wipe with!

** Removal of a semi-digested book from a depressed author's stomach.

** Girl with a misshapen spine at a 90-degree angle. She had VATER ( now known as VACTERL) syndrome either combined with scoliosis or completely separately.

** Man shot in the chest at point blank range with a bazooka.

** Quintuplets.

** Giant pylon falling on a woman's face, making her bruised beyond recognition, and also amnesiac. ''While pregnant.''

** Clairvoyance and a brain tumor.

** A nineteen-year-old boy encased in cement.

* 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.

** [[Truth in Television]], most doctors graduating in the past few decades have never seen a actual live case of measels.

* Played realistically on ''[[Golden Girls]]''. Dorothy was struck with a strange illness that left her perpetually lethargic. She had gone to several doctors and even traveled to a specialist in New York, only to be told she was just getting old and should do something new like get her hair done or some nonsense. It was only after a 5th (?) opinion that she was diagnosed with the rare Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. This episode was inspired by one of the produces coming down with this same disorder.

** Actually, CFS is a diagnosis of exclusion (that is, when every known cause of fatigue has been ruled out you call it CFS), and there is no specific treatment. Getting diagnosed with CFS isn't really all that helpful. If Dorothy was the kind of person who enjoyed getting a new hairdo, that actually wouldn't be a bad idea to help relieve her symptoms.

== Stand Up Comedy ==

* [[Jeff Foxworthy]] hangs a lampshade on it, retelling his wife's over-reaction every time she sees an article about a disease on 60Minutes.

'''Jeff:''' You do ''not'' have testicular cancer! You don't even have testiculars! }}

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* ''[[The Simpsons]]'': Mr. Burns was diagnosed with '''every''' disease.

Doctor: Uh, a little bit, yes. You also have several diseases that have just been discovered - in you. }}

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Index Syndrome]]

[[Category:Drama Tropes]]

[[Category:Medical Drama]]