Abram Sauer Online

Three is a trend, right?

While the health-care debate rages crawls on, one thing seems to be clear: Everyone from “The people” to politicians are in agreement that doctors are a problem. Either they are too greedy or they are too clueless and out of touch with real patient needs or they are incompetent, slowlky killing us all one mistake at a time. So it’s a great time to make shows focused on the real heroes of health-care, nurses.

And to make the nurses look more heroic and competent, doctors are being played off as arrogant, dismissive imbeciles whose lack of knowledge about medicine is killing people left and right. (One line, in response to a patient who asks what the nurses are good for, from the nurses on the show Mercy: “We protect you from the doctors.”

Trailers for the upcoming nurse-centric NBC show Mercy, Edie Falco’s project Nurse Jackie and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Hawthorne all, to some degree (Mercy is the absolute worst), play off the audience’s already-held beliefs about doctors being absolute shits. Part of this doctors-as-the-problem comes from the recent docs-in-pop-culture shows like Grey’s Anatomy, which, working on a CSI-level of misinformation about a profession, lead audiences to see doctors as self-absorbed jerks more concerned with their lack of orgasms than their patients’ mortality.

Gone are the days of ER, when nurses were capable and so were the doctors.

Sick people, and even healthy people, generally fear doctors because they (the doctors) have all the power in the relationship. Meanwhile, nurses seem more “like you and me.” Kind of like how George Bush was, you know, not one of those wonky eggheads; he was a guy’s guy. Nurses, likewise, are the ones you’d like to have a beer with.

Stupid doctors.