Tuesday, April 28, 2009

House

I've actually missed all of the current season of House. I have watched seasons 1-3 on DVDs, but haven't managed to catch up to the current season yet. But, when I discovered last week that last night's episode of House would be dealing with deafness and cochlear implants, I had my Nebraskan friend remind me to tune in, just so I could catch this episode.

I have to say, last night's episode was very interesting, although not entirely accurate with the cochlear implant issue. A standard hospital doctor wouldn't be telling a standard surgeon to go ahead and implant a teenager while he's still in the OR. You have to go through testings and evaluations before you can even get a cochlear implant, to make sure the cochleas and nerves are intact and all that jazz. Also, one's implant wouldn't be activated right after surgery and that person wouldn't right off the bat be understanding speech. It was just a bit odd how they played out the implant deal. But it was interesting to see they used the Harmony device from Advanced Bionics. And for the teenager to rip the implant out of his head, that's just not right either, as the implant nowadays is stutured in so it doesn't get dislodged, and the incision in the skin is stitched/stapled up.

It's weird, because usually the people involved with creating House do their research and even consult with professionals about certain illnesses, disabilities, medications, procedures, etc. so I'm surprised at the amount of inaccuracies with last night's episode. Did they just not do a thorough research or something? Could they not get in touch with cochlear implant specialists? Hm. But it was still interesting to watch.

6 comments:

JennyB said...

I was sooo insulted by that episode! It was incredibly wrong! Like everything about it was wrong! and the mother's deciding to reimplant her son in the end..that was stupid!
It made me so mad...

Sam the Deaf said...

That show put in target toward certainly people like us - the deaf to be piss off at that show. It works.

I love HOUSE MD! <3

CDM said...

I didn't get pissed off, since I kept in mind that it's just a show and they're not going to get everything 100% accurate in a 1-hour episode. I feel they could have done better though.

JRS said...

Yeah. I think everyone's complaining about the testing process and speed by which the child was implanted. As you noted, one hour tv program. I remember when Star Trek first came out, people had the same complaints about warp speed. It doesn't change the fact that it was a convenient way to tell a story about the emotional process while speeding up the mechanical process.

sara said...

I don't watch the show but I don't know how accurate any of the topics are. My friend is very familiar with Neurofobrosis (NF-2) and she says they got it wrong on the show too.

My guess is they go for entertainment and drama over accuracy.

Jennifer said...

i can see speeding up the mechanics for the sake of story to some degree, but part of the emotional process is dealing with the weeks of waiting finding out if you are suitable for CI, ordering the CI, healing from the surgery, waiting for activation, and learning to make sense of the noise. taking a lot (all!) of the difficulty out of the process completely changes the rules of the game. if CI was an easy peasy process that had instantaneous results, i think it would be a lot less controversial.