Medical Review of Pure Genius, episode 1: “Pilot”

The show wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t good. It was…bland.

James Bell is a techie wunderkind who opens a private hospital catering to the most intriguing and desperate cases (by invitation only, of course). Maverick — yet world famous — surgeon Dr. Walter Wallace is invited to join the faculty. The rest of the faculty are young more-or-less interchangeable doctors and engineers and only two or three show any spark of characterization at this point.
This is a difficult show to review medically, as the medicine — such as it is — bears more resemblance to Star Trek than reality. Additionally, the patients are all two-dimensionsal and cliché: there’s coma girl, there’s pregnant-woman-who-has-to-make-a-difficult-choice, etc.

Krissy Ramirez is a 16 year-old girl who’s been in a coma for unknown reasons for over six months. The show gets points for correctly shows her breathing through a tracheostomy tube, because patients who need long term mechanical ventilation, such as coma patients, are transitioned from an endotracheal tube to a tracheostomy because it is better for the body long term.
To see if Krissy still “inside,” James hooks her up to her mother through an experimental brain-to-brain communication device (FDA approval? Who needs that?). The team is excited that while hooked up the her mother, Krissy’s EEG shows increased brain activity. Then, when Krissy’s fa...

Source: Polite Dissent - October 27, 2016 Category: Primary Care Authors: Scott Tags: newtag Source Type: blogs