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Max’s unusually accurate medical drama, starring Noah Wyle as a beleaguered E.R. physician, has become the talk of real-life hospital breakrooms.
Doctors and nurses who love Max’s “The Pitt” remember the moment they realized it wasn’t like other medical shows.
Caitlin Dwyer, a charge nurse in Milwaukee, took note of a character’s decision — counterintuitive but medically correct — not to defibrillate a patient with no pulse.
Dr. Elizabeth Rempfer, an attending physician in Maryland, felt a pang of recognition at the depiction of a chaotic and desperate waiting room.
For Dr. Tricia Pendergrast, a resident physician in Ann Arbor, Mich., it was a character who faced such an unrelenting caseload that even a trip to the bathroom was cut short.
“It’s the first time that I’ve watched doctors on television that I felt like I could see myself in them,” she said.
Most medical professionals learned long ago not to expect reality in dramatizations of their work. From the early days of “General Hospital,” to “Grey’s Anatomy” and its various spinoffs, to more recent hits like “The Good Doctor” and “Brilliant Minds,” TV medical dramas have tended to go heavy on the drama, light on the medicine.