Newsflash: Fiction is Sometimes Medically Inaccurate

When you watch a movie or TV show featuring characters in your own profession, it's natural to criticize the fact that the writers are not as familiar with that profession as someone who actually does it for a living. It would be nice to get professional credit for such criticism, wouldn't it? A doctor from the Netherlands managed to get his study published in a medical journal from research obtained by reading romance novels. The eight novels were set in the world of medicine, and the actual medicine in this fiction was found to be "sometimes incorrect."
CONCLUSION: The doctors novels which were studied give an unbalanced and distorted view of medical practice. The medical information was sometimes incorrect, partly due to lack of knowledge by the author, partly due to incorrect translation from English. The reality of medical practice was not represented accurately in either of the series investigated, although the medical information in the ‘Doctors novels’ series appeared to be accurate more often than that in the ‘Dr. Anne’ series.

I wonder if he got a grant for this. Read more at Improbable Research. Link

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I see. Medical practice in fiction is sometimes not represented accurately. You mean like a resident who finagles a donor heart for her lover and ends up killing him instead and still has a job, even though everyone knows what she did? Kind of like that? Why don't I ever think of making a study like that and (hopefully) getting paid for it? (kicking self)
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