Archived Discussion Main / TelevisuallyTransmittedDisease

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

From YKTTW

Cut/reworked:

• but among real urban children in developed countries, the rates are almost as bad. (Depends on the city you are talking about. Los Angeles? Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? Mexico City? Cubatao Valley, Brazil? Linfen, China? Milan, Italy? Athens, Greece? Norilsk, Russia? But not every city these days suffers from dramatic air pollution. And often, air pollution originates in one place, but is carried on high wind somewhere else, even across the sea, as happens with pollution from China's east coast drifting east across the sea to Japan.)

because it was probably meant for discussion all along. But feel free to check my edit for suckage.

• Sometimes, however, this happens in real life. This editor knows of one case where doctors at a hospital in the Yukon Territory of Canada were puzzled by a patient's symptoms for some time until they realized he had malaria (the patient being a geologist who'd just returned from Southeast Asia and apparently had been infected before he got on the plane). While malaria isn't exceptionally rare, it's not something people living near the Arctic Circle run into very often.

I don't really see that this is a real-life example of this; it's just an actual case of a rare disease.

Ununnilium:

• Hallucinations: In real life, hallucinations not triggered by drugs are always a serious psychological symptom. On TV, perfectly sane characters hallucinate all the time. It's especially common for them to (whisper)see dead people, but The Sixth Sense was one of the few times this was taken as seriously as it deserves. TV hallucinations may be more reasonable if they're just visual shorthand for the character's thought processes and they're not literally seeing anything.

This just confuses me; the "thought processes" thing doesn't belong here at all, and when do sane characters hallucinate, ever?

Gareth I'm thinking of situations like in Providence, where the main character sees her dead mother but isn't supposed to have any mental disorder.

Big T: Yeah, that seems to happen a lot when a character is in the throws of grief, or or other powerful psychotic states where hallucinations are not in any way common. Flashbacks and/or dream sequences seem to get mixed with reality. It's usually quite short term, though, which is probably why no one ever gets it checked out. Still, it's something that happens on TV but not in real life. Perhaps it's time to start another trope?

Dr. Cox: "Newbie, do you happen to know what a zebra is?" J.D.: "That patient just mocked me!" Dr. Cox: "It's a diagnosis of a ridiculously obscure disease when it's much more likely that the patient has a common illness presenting with uncommon symptoms. In other words, if you hear hoof-beats, you just go ahead and think horsies — not zebras. Mm'kay, Mr. Silly Bear?"

Duckay: The quote on this page is Older Than They Think. It's not from Scrubs, though they referenced it.

• That actually happens sometimes. I forget the name of the condition but the various processes and nerve endings and whatnot that cause orgasms (Shut up, I don't know anything about what causes an orgasm if you want me to go any deeper than "stimulation of the crotch area") are so sensitive that everything from the rubbing of her panties to a gentle breeze passing by are enough to cause a woman to orgasm. My parents read Parade, they had an article about a chick with that once.
• Truth in Television. This editor had a conversation with someone who contracted such from contact with her husband after he'd been weeding their backyard.
• This Troper would like to point out that Scoliosis is in fact quite common though regularly screened for and easily treated in the early stages.
• This troper has scoliosis.

*** It wasn't to make a point in the way implied above though - the doctor in question was doing it in a desperate attempt to convince people that vitamin C cured polio, which would force pharmaceutical companies to research it and thus aid the people of the Third World. He's more a miniature version of a Well-Intentioned Extremist

** Then again, there's the episode where the team loses a patient because her unusual symptoms are caused by a simple infection, instead of the rare disease that they were looking for.

** Note that the writers of House are well aware of the zebra quote—in fact, Foreman actually uses it at one point—as it's standard in medical textbooks; the original title of the show was actually Chasing Zebras. This was eventually dropped because, well, it would give new viewers all kinds of wrong assumptions. They burned through a lot of titles before they decided to just name the show after the main character, as a last resort.

*** And she wanted that cured why, exactly?

***wonderful...

*** It's VACTERL now (used to be VATER). I find your lack of precision... disturbing.

*** Truth in Television. You're not dead until you're warm and dead. This troper recalls a line from class about how near-drowning patients combined with hypothermia have revived after a significant time being pulseless and apneic - given that they got to a hospital quickly and were rewarmed and resuscitated properly.

*** Very much Truth in Television. The current record holder for lowest accidental hypothermia survivor is a woman who drowned in an ice-cold river in Scandinavia by becoming trapped under an ice sheet. She could only be freed after an hour and 19 minutes, and was clinically dead. Her core body temperature had sunk to 13.7° Celsius when she was rushed to the hospital. Fortunately, she was treated by a hypothermia specialist. After 9 hours of resuscitation and 35 days on a ventilator and a further five months of rehabilitation, she was able to resume her job as a hospital doctor, with no neurological damage. (Gilbert M, Busund R, Skagseth A, Nilsen PA, Solbø JP.:Resuscitation from accidental hypothermia of 13.7 degrees C with circulatory arrest. Lancet. 2000 Jan 29;355(9201):375-6.) Her case challenges the medical belief that core temperatures below 28° Celsius in humans are rarely survivable. Instead, forced "hibernation" may enable human brains to survive without oxygen for far longer than previously thought.

*** Other victims of hypothermia have not been so lucky,for example a man who survived a night in a snowbank (Moser, Voelckel, Gardetto, Sumann, Wenzel: One night in a snowbank: A case report of severe hypothermia and cardiac arrest. Resuscitation, Volume 65, Issue 3, Pages 365-368), with his core temperature below 21° Celsius. Unfortunately, his extremities had frozen, and his toes and both hands had to amputated.

*** She wasn't a hermaphrodite; she only had female sex organs, though they didn't work very well. She was "immune to testosterone", with a condition that causes a fetus with XY chromosomes (normally male) to not respond to the male-generating hormones in the womb, thus being born and developing as a female.

*** Actually, she had only male sex organs (internal testes, but no ovaries or uterus). Androgen insensitivity caused her to develop feminine secondary sex characteristics (breasts, hips, a pseudo-vagina). I'm not sure if androgen insensitivity is considered intersexuality or hermaphroditism.

*** One of those times fully falling in with this trope: Dr. Cox tests for mundane diseases fitting the symptoms, and JD wants to test for necrotizing fasciitis. Of course, the latter turns out to be true, setting up the conflict du jour between Cox and JD.

*** Actually, in those places in the Amazon river where candiru lives, the natives protect themselves when entering the water by wearing loincloths wrapped around their thighs and groin area (and not peeing in the water). Wearing any sort of close-fitting underwear will help.

So the amount of asthma patients among kids is high, but aren't kids using inhalers more often in shows because it shows "this kid has asthma" pretty quick? IANAD, but I think that using an inhaler on TV this much is mostly done for dramatic effect.