Codes

I’m continuing my review of the movie Flatliners that released last year which is a reimagined redux of the original 1990 movie.

In the movie, a group of medical students intentionally put one another into cardiac arrest so they can have a near death experience (NDE). Let’s examine medically whether or not their method would work.

The plan is to anesthetize the inductee with Propofol (which is a short term anesthetic), cool their core body temperature, and then defribillate them with electricity causing them to flatline. Keep in mind, asystole means there is no electrical activity happening in the heart. You can read a post I did here on how electricity or defibrillation really works. Amazingly, in this medical center’s basement in another fully functional hospital with a very expensive MRI to be used during a disaster.

Issue #1: A medical center has a fully functional part of the hospital with an expensive MRI that is doesn’t use. Any empty, unused space in the hospital is a drain on the budget. Especially an expensive piece of radiology equipment. No sane hospital anywhere would be leaving that piece of equipment unused in a basement.

Issue #2: What they show is not an MRI. MRI scans take a long time and can never be done in 60 seconds.

Issue #3: Trusting a fellow medical student to resusciate you. Need I say more?

Issue #4: Knowing that they are going to put someone in cardiac arrest, no one really bothers to hook up a resuscitation bag.

Issue #5: During one code that begins to run several minutes, one of the students orders another to put the cooling blanket back on because “she’s too warm”. This flies in the face of every resusciation protocol there is. There is a somewhat well used phrase that you must be “warm and dead”. Suboptimal body temperature makes resuscitation more difficult. They are only making their job harder.

Issue #6: Endotracheal tubes have a balloon on the end that must be inflated to stay in place and deflated to take out. No one seems very concerned about this.

Issue #7: You cannot deliver electricity over clothing. Bare skin only. Also, paddles are really not used any more for a variety of reasons. Most hospitals have transitioned to patches. The paddles are used as a back-up.

Issue #8: Propofol is a distinctive milky white substance. Seems easy enough to draw up some milk in your syringe for the movie to simulate this.

Issue #9: You cannot shock a heart that is in asystole into a normal rhythm. You can see my post above for that. Can you shock someone into asystole? There is a rare possibility that you can shock someone and stop their heart. However, the common rhythms a person would go into because of this is V-tach and V-fib and not asystole. The movie depending on this rare event for every flatline is unrealistic.

Issue #10: You can tell when a shock is delivered to a patient because generally they have quite a few muscles contract. Patients never come up off the bed as dramatically as on film or television. In fact, I’ve never seen a patient come up off the bed at all.

Have you seen Flatliners? What did you think of the medical aspects?

Seems like this television season there have been quite a few new medical dramas hitting the airwaves. I’ve done a four part series on The Good Doctor (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4) and 9-1-1. Newest onto the small screen is Fox’s The Resident.

It will make you hate hospitals and everything about them.

There are a few that say to me, “Why try and correct all this misinformation? Most people know it’s not factual.” It might actually surprise you how many people view what they see on television as real and true. The recent demise of crock pots everywhere after an episode This Is Us led the company to release a statement about their safety.

The Resident highlights every horrible hospital stereotype . . . literally on the planet. This is pretty amazing for a show to do in one hour. The show centers around two residents: the senior resident Dr. Conrad Hawkins and a new bright and shiny resident, Dr. Devon Pravesh. One big problem . . . it’s not even clear what type of residents they are.

Hawkins is the gunslinger. The medical doctor who knows everything under the sun and bucks corruption (and common sense) at every possible turn. He is brash, arrogant, and needs a few classes in mentoring and bedside manner. Well, not just him, but really the entire cast of doctors from the senior attending with tremors who shouldn’t be doing surgery anymore to the wicked smart surgical resident who, in a room full of people (and on the fly by no less) states to a family that the result of their loved ones surgery was “Prescott’s dead.”

Sweet.

I don’t even like this show a little bit. As it stands now, I personally find nothing redeeming about it. Not only medically, but socially as well.

Here is just a short list to get us started on what’s wrong with The Resident.

An open appendectomy. Appendectomies are mostly done laparoscopically. In this patient, it’s even commented that it hasn’t ruptured so it should be the easiest of all appendectomies. However, this patient has a heinously large incision and the attending physician (the one with the horrible hand tremors) nicks an artery and the patient dies.

A short surgical code. It is true that surgeons don’t like deaths to occur in the actual OR. Considering that, the surgical code (compared to a medical code later) is laughingly short. Like big shrugs around the room after a few minutes— golly gee, our patient is dead. Not sure how we treat hemorrhage.

The cover-up. I can’t say with one-hundred percent certainty that no bad medical outcome is hidden, but I will say that the climate is definitely supporting the truth coming out in the hospital setting. In this television episode, it’s plainly clear that this attending surgeon has a reputation for bad outcomes and the staff has been covering this up for a while. After the patient dies, they develop “the story” to cover up the surgeon’s negligence. Hands down, this puts too many careers at risk and most people aren’t willing to take that chance. This is beyond “playing along”. Most hospitals have corporate compliance hotlines where concerns can be left anonymously. Honestly, it would increase the tension of this television show to have someone trying to expose him.

Next post, we’ll continue our discussion on the medical inaccuracies of The Resident.