Emergency Contact Form: Fill & Download for Free

Most real-life examples of children who became feral were not children adopted by animals (e.g., Tarzan being raised by apes), but children abandoned or mistreated by other humans. The animalistic behavior displayed by these children was usually the result of severe deprivation, mental illness, or congenital disorders exacerbated from being put out in the wild, not because the children were emulating animal "parents."Peter, the Wildboy of Hanover was found in 1725 in a forest in northern Germany, where he walked on all fours and survived on eating plants. King George I ordered that Peter be transported to England, where he was incorporate into King George's court. Caroline of Ansbach, who was then Princess of Wales, arranged for Peter to get an education from Dr. John Arbuthnot, a physician and literary collaborator with Jonathan Swift, but Arbuthnot had no success at teaching Peter to speak, read, or write.Peter was sent to live in a rural area of Hertfordshire under the care of some local farmers, but he escaped in 1751. Peter was then found again after a local jail in Norwich discovered it had a prisoner who was really hairy and made sounds that some observers compared to orangutang. Peter was then returned to the farmer taking care of him in Hertfordshire, but he would be made to wear a special leather collar with his name and address on it in case ever escape or got lost again. Peter died in 1785 at an estimated age of about 70 years, but never learned to say any words besides "Peter" and "King George." The picture of Peter found below is taken from a painting of the court of King George I.Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc, also known as the Wild Girl of Champagne, was a Native American girl born in Wisconsin as a member of the Fox tribe. A Canadian woman brought her to France by ship, but the woman who brought her probably died during an outbreak of bubonic plague, which convinced Marie-Angélique to flee into the forest. Instead of being adopted by wolves, she actually fought them off with a club and a long stick with a sharp metal tip, which she either stole or found somewhere in the woods. When she was found in 1731 outside Champagne, France, she had lost the ability to speak and had exhibited other regressive behaviors. After a period of ten years, Marie-Angélique recovered the ability to speak and then later learned to read and write. The picture below is taken from an illustration in a book depicting Marie-Angélique at the time she was rediscovered in 1731.Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron was a prepubescent boy often spotted in the woods of Saint-Sernin-Sur-Rance in the 1790s. Three hunters found him in a tree in 1797 and brought him to a local village, but he escaped to the woods again, where he was spotted in 1798 and 1799, although not captured. In January 1800, he finally emerged from the woods of his own accord.Eventually, a medical student, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, brought Victor into his home. At the time, Victor was a complete enigma to both physicans and French Enlightenment philosophers. Victor was mute, preferred foods found in the forest, and was found with unexplained scars. In a way, Victor represented a crucial test for the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. According to Rousseauist philosophy, Victor was a "noble savage," and Itard should have been able to teach Victor by imprinting new material on the "blank slate" of Victor's consciousness. As it turned out, Itard could only get Victor to spell out two phrases, lait (milk) and Oh, Dieu (Oh, God), but Itard's work with Victor later proved helpful in developing educational techniques that worked with the deaf and the developmentally disabled. The story of Itard and Victor of Aveyron would later inspire the Francois Truffaut film, The Wild Child:Genie was the fourth child born to a family in Arcadia, California. She came to public attention in 1970 when a social worker met Genie after Genie's mother brought her along to an appointment about getting disability benefits. The social worker estimated that Genie was about 5 or 6 years old and possibly autistic, but she soon learned from Genie's mother that the girl was 13. The social worker was so horrified about Genie's condition that she immediately contacted her supervisor, who in turn contacted the police. Genie was then made a ward of the court and transferred to a children's hospital in Los Angeles for observation. This is a picture of what the 13-year-old Genie looked like shortly after she was rescued.The story that emerged about Genie involved one of the worst cases of child abuse in modern times, as if somebody had implemented a childrearing manual written by John Doe from Se7en. Genie had a congenital hip dislocation that made it difficult to learn how to walk, which led her father to jump to the conclusion that Genie was mentally retarded. The father reacted to this development by keeping Genie hidden from the outside world. During the day, the father would let Genie wear only diapers while she was tied by a harness to a children's toilet. At night, assuming her father could be bothered to get her out of the harness, the father would put Genie in a sleeping bag inside a crib with a metal screen on top. While on the toilet or inside her sleeping bag, the father ensured that Genie could not move either her arms or her legs. Her father would not let her eat any solid food and, if she made any noises or vocalizations, her father would beat her with a large plank and growl at her like a dog.Aptitude tests indicated that Genie had the mental age of a 13-month-old baby. She had no understanding of grammar and only knew two phrases, "stop it" and "no more," yet tests also indicated that Genie had no neurological disorders, mental disorders, skull abnormalities, or chromosome damage.Until she turned 18, most of Genie's life revolved around being the subject of an NIMH study about language acquisition. At first, Genie's teacher, Jean Butler, tried to become Genie's foster parent, but the state of California denied Butler's application. After no one else would house or take care of Genie, lead investigator David Rigler and his wife decided they would provide Genie a home. Over several years, Genie eventually accumulated a vocabulary of several hundred words, but she could rarely form a sentence of more than three words and most of those sentences lacked anything beyond the most rudimentary sentence structure.Reports of Genie after the 1980s have generally indicated that she regressed linguistically and behaviorally. According to an ABC News broadcast in 2008, Genie was living in California as a ward of the state in a facility for mentally underdeveloped adults. She reportedly only spoke a few words, but could communicate in sign language.The story of these four feral children suggest that animals childrearing abandoned babies is at best a Disneyfied myth. According to British geneticist Phil Beale, Peter the Wild Boy probably had a chromosomal anomaly called Pitt-Hopkins syndrome that left him severely retarded. He was likely abandoned in the woods as a child, but never very far from farmland. Out of these four cases, Memmie Le Blanc lived the furthest out in the wild, but she fought off wolves using manmade tools she managed to scrounge up somewhere. Like Peter the Wild Boy, Victor of Aveyron also was spotted near farmland. Victor's symptoms were consistent with severe autism, and the marks found on his body when he was captured can easily be explained as the result of child abuse. Genie was never actually in the wild at all, but reverted to an animalistic state as a result of severe physical, mental, and emotional abuse.The only "feral child" in these four cases who successfully assimilated into society was Memmie Le Blanc, and she required almost a decade to recover from her years in the wild fighting off wolves with sticks. In addition, Memmie Le Blanc was the only one who did not show signs of abandonment, parental abuse, or mental retardation. In the other three cases, neither Peter nor Victor nor Genie ever learned to speak with a normal level of verbal fluency, let alone assimilate into society.

Leads are the lifeblood of any business.Any business that finds it difficult to generate regular leads will stagnate, and may eventually collapse.After reading this, and using the powerful tips you’ll learn from it, I foresee that your business will thrive even in the face of tough competition.Let me introduce you to 5 smart ways to drive massive sales leads to your business.1. Interview InfluencersAn important marketing strategy is beginning to emerge in the age of ad-blocking technology:It’s called Influencer Marketing.Just take a look at Google Trends and see it for yourself:Influencer marketing is exploding at a fast pace.Influencer marketing is the quickest way to prove your business credibility and increases your chance of attracting a lot of new leads.Interviewing a big name could do wonders for your business.When you interview an influencer, you introduce yourself to a larger audience and the doors of leads begin to open to you.Your interview could be a blog post, a SlideShare presentation or a video.Most big names are more accessible than you think.You can connect with influencers through their favorite social platforms. You can also reach them through their emails or contact form which can be found on their websites.Make sure the topic of your interview is based on a common problem most of your prospects have.2. Write, Publish And Sell BooksIt’s widely believed that only people who want to pursue careers as authors could write and sell books, but that is a wrong notion.Book publishing is another way to get your name and business out there in front of prospects.In today’s world of content marketing, marketers must start thinking and acting like book publishers to get attention.For example, Ramit Sethi is widely known as a top personal finance blogger today, but he was pretty unknown before he published his book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich.His book earned the world’s attention and got him featured on ABC News, CNN and WSJ.For example, let’s say you run a pool construction business in California.How can you use book publishing to get leads?You could write a book about the lifestyle of pool owners in California where you interview pool owners in the state and ask them to share their wealth secrets and some wonderful life lessons.This may not sound like the nicest book idea, but someone who’s looking to build a pool in the state would definitely want to read a book like this. That exposes your name and business to potential customers.You could write a book about various pool exercises.You could write a swimming guide.You could write a guide about how to throw an amazing pool party.You could also write a book about related topics like home cleaning and decoration.Note that your purpose of writing a book isn’t to promote your business, but to educate potential customers.People don’t want to be sold. They want to be informed.So write your book from a neutral perspective and give actionable insights.Then use your author’s bio to promote your business.Before you know it, you’ll start getting calls from prospects asking you about your products and services.3. Speak At Conferences, Trade Shows And Industry EventsNeil Patel revealed that he was able to lock Online Poker Strategy School into a $1.2 million contract when he spoke about online marketing at an online gambling event.To Neil, speaking at conferences is the best way to land highly qualified clients.But here’s something important you may not know about Neil:“To gain exposure for Crazy Egg, I would apply to speak at conferences and discuss whatever topic the conference organizer wanted me to talk about… even if it wasn’t related to analytics.Instead of asking the organizer to pay for my travel expenses or to provide me with a speaking fee, I would kindly ask them to make Crazy Egg a sponsor of their event.Sponsorships didn’t cost the conference a dime, and it provided us with additional exposure that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.”—Neil PatelWeb celebrities like Chris Brogan, Mari Smith, Neil Patel and Gary Vaynerchuk are able to further enhance their personal brands and businesses because they speak at a number of events every year.You’re probably thinking that you suck at public speaking and you know nothing special to talk about.Everyone once sucks at public speaking. Everyone once doesn’t have a clue of what to say or how to say it.In his book “How To Talk To Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere: The Secrets of Good Communication,” Larry King said he messed up in his first speaking engagement.Speaking is a great way to build buzz for your business and get high-quality leads even your biggest competitors can’t get.Depending on the industry you are in, you could be picking up $10,000 per speaking engagement (though it takes time before you can start earning that much).While speaking would attract wealth and valuable connections into your life, your business would benefit the most from your speaking engagements.People will associate your name with your company. And if the organizers are charging at least $1,000 per ticket, you can expect to meet clients who could offer you multi-million dollar business deals.4. Create And Distribute InfographicsTop brands like Google, Wimdu, MoveHub, and Samuel Windsor are masters when it comes to infographics.These companies have been able to generate a lot of buzz around their businesses using the power of infographics.There’s a reason why people love sharing infographics:They are easily digestible visual contents.Infographics are more engaging, accessible, persuasive, fun and easier to recall than any other content type.No wonder infographic is the most shared content type on the web:Infographics are also 30 times more likely to get read than a text article which is the top reason why you should be using them to generate leads for your business.5. Create A Free Software ToolThis could be one of the most powerful, yet under-used lead generation strategies for getting thousands of high-quality leads per month.The good thing about this strategy is that you only have to create that special tool once and keep promoting it (and watch as other people start promoting it for you).And then sit back and relax as thousands of leads start coming to you.Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a perfect example of what I’m talking about here.Screaming Frog is a digital marketing agency based in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom.Their digital marketing services range from search engine marketing, SEO, link building, pay per click (PPC) management, content marketing, social media etc.The agency offers a free tool called SEO Spider which does a host of things like finding broken links, discovering duplicate contents, analyzing page titles and meta data and more.The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool receives hundreds of mentions and backlinks every month from authority websites. That sends thousands of monthly visitors to the Screaming Frog website and some of those visitors would definitely become clients of Screaming Frog.For example, below is a screenshot of a recent mention of Screaming Frog on BloggingCage, a blog that receives 154,000 monthly visits according to SimilarWeb.HubSpot also has a free tool called Website Grader which helps you analyze how strong your website is.You’ll have to enter your website address along with your email address if you want to receive the Website Grader analysis – that automatically turns you into a lead, of course.Note: I wrote a comprehensive article titled “17 Best Ways To Get Highly Qualified Business Leads.”Thanks for reading.

Q. Did medical doctors and nurses watch the ER series when it was popular?A. I liked the show and the characters, but the medicine was bad, contrived, inaccurate, and fantasized. I imagine what other professions Hollywood gets wrong. Policemen, attorneys, reporters must cringe all the time.The contemporaneous medical show Chicago Hope was more realistic and less dramatized, in the beginning.Scrubs surprisingly was more accurate. ER actually had a script consultant (Greg Moran, MD) who trained in Emergency Medicine and Infectious Disease at USC and is Vice Chair of Emergency Medicine at UCLA.TV Medical Drama Accuracy FAIL! (In 3 Categories) - Soliant Healthby TERA TUTEN onAPRIL 13, 2011“It must be true…I saw it on TV,” many non-medical professionals exclaim, after catching some insights on a procedure or disease during a modern medical drama episode.It’s a refrain heard over and over again, and while many entertaining depictions of life from the ER to the OR employ consultants in the medical industry, there’s no rule that says their advice has to be obeyed.From entire series’ to reoccurring myths to specific (sometimes brutal) technical blunders, here are a few of the glaring accuracy fails we’ve spotted in three cringe-inducing categories…TVs most prominent medical shows ranked according to accurate portrayal of real-life hospital situations:Scrubs – Surprisingly, this bumbling live-action cartoon was heralded by doctors and med students as the most true-to-life medical TV series in terms of both technical accuracy and capturing the culture of doctors and interns (more…)St. Elsewhere – Sure, it was easier to remain true to the real-life profession when TV reigned as the supreme medium and ratings were a cakewalk, but the folks at St. Eligius did it with an homage to real medical doctors, nurses and hospitals that’s tough to equal in any decadeER– Despite having the master of researched fiction – Michael Crichton – as its creator and consultant, the team at County General lands just in the middle of the spectrum. (To put it in perspective, though, Crichton is the same person who created Jurassic Park.)House, MD – Some well-researched plots but also some pretty far-fetched situations you wouldn’t encounter outside the world of fiction. (full medical reviews of each episode…)Grey's Anatomy – Squarely at the bottom, TV’s most popular medical drama is also heralded by doctors as the least accurate, when it comes to portraying life working at a hospital. As addictive as it is, Grey’s is also by-far the greatest committer of the following sins:Most common inaccurate portrayals of hospitals and their staff on TV medical dramas:The TV myth: Doctors operating outside their specialtyThe reality: Though shows like ER or Grey’s depict surgeons performing every procedure in the hospital, this just ain’t so. The sheer variety of surgeries in different specialties that doctors perform on these shows is also something you’ll only see on TV.The TV myth: Doctors doing everything at every step in patient careThe reality: Many patients who are fans of these shows are amazed to see that the nurses in real hospitals seem to do everything. (Usually this appearance is because patients see nurses many times more often than doctors, though it’s also because – unlike on TV– doctors don’t do most of the stuff to patients that looks cool on TV.)The TV myth: Patients revived just in time for the commercial breakThe reality: Though lots of medical dramas let the credits roll right after a dramatic death scored with a melancholy Top 40 ballad, the same shows also rely on just-in-time resuscitations before or after commercial breaks. In reality, flat-lines can’t be solved with paddles, CPR is rarely successful, and hospital resuscitations are successful 5-10% of the time in ideal circumstances.The TV myth: Every resident leaving the hospital at the same time (often to go have drinks)The reality: Though this was a favorite of ER and Grey’s, it’s just mathematically impossible. In addition, as one poster on http://forums.studentdoctor.net/ puts it “you aren’t going to meet too many surgeons who tie one on every weeknight to the point of inebriation and are able to show up in the morning ready to work. (Many of the surgeons I know won’t even drink coffee within a day of a surgery because it makes them jittery).”The TV myth: Doctors hooking up with colleagues on-the-jobThe reality: *Ahem* You know which show we’re talking about here…Beyond doctors on almost every post on the web that discusses this laughingly wondering which hospital in America they could work at that would actually allow them enough time to form a romantic relationship with a colleague, such broom closet rendezvous’ would be serious cause for dismissal at pretty much any real-life facility.Specific medical accuracy FAILs on TVIn one Grey’s Anatomy episode, two characters perform an illegal autopsy against a family’s wishes. On the show, the characters are forgiven (instead of arrested) because they discover the patient had a rare genetic disease. Since the Tuskegee tragedy, noted a recent Slate article, doctors have instilled institutional checks to ensure that clinical research is ethical. Unfortunately, many patients may still avoid doctors because now they are afraid of being experimented on after – in their minds – TV fiction confirmed their worst fears.Medical Investigation (NBC, 2004-2005), did the out-in-the-field epidemic detective work of the CDC but were identified as employees of the National Institutes of Health (a federal agency more focused on lab-based science.) Also, the heroes wore leather jackets while checking for a deadly pathogen (*pff!* who needs that mandatory protective gear.)A Canadian study out of Halifax Nova Scotia’s Dartmouth University showed that TV doctors and nurses responded inappropriately to seizures almost half the time: “Television dramas are a potentially powerful method of educating the public about first aid and seizures,” said study author Andrew Moeller. “Our results, showing that television shows inaccurately showed seizure management half the time, are a call to action. People with epilepsy should lobby the television industry to adhere to guidelines for first aid management of seizures.”In another Grey’s episode, Dr. Yang asks a woman to donate her husband’s organs after he dies. Yang tanks in the sensitivity department, dispassionately asking for the husband’s eyes and skin, then runs out of the room as the wife begins to cry. “The scene is rife with errors that could damage public perception of organ donation,” noted the same Slate piece. As it turns out, Yang is jockeying for the husband’s organs because another patient – a close friend of the chief of surgery – is dying from liver failure and will be saved if the wife agrees. In real life, hospitals go to great lengths to prevent these types of conflicts of interest, barring doctors from approaching patients and designating statewide organizations (rather than individual hospitals) to distribute organs.That’s not all…More TV medical myths:http://realdoctorstu.com/2011/01/19/the-top-10-medical-tv-myths/New program pairs U.S. health officials with Hollywood writers: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/660213843/US-health-officials-prescribing-doses-of-medical-accuracy-for-TV-shows.htmlKeeping medicine on TV real: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18233164/ns/health-health_care/The most accurate television show about the medical profession? Scrubs.By Joanna WeissZach Braff in ScrubsAny fictional television show about a real profession runs the risk of getting things wrong. I work for a newspaper and cringe whenever I see reporters portrayed on TV. (They're always so self-serving and venal. What's up with that?) I once interviewed a criminology professor who complained about the stunningly obvious things CSI characters say at crime scenes. Real forensic investigators, he explained, don't shout, "Look at this! It looks like blood! We'd better send it to the lab!" But if you talk to doctors, they'll often sing the praises of one medical show in particular, which they say captures the training process, the profession, and the dynamics of a hospital with remarkable accuracy. No, it's not House, the tale of a misanthrope who happens to be a doctor. It's not Grey's Anatomy, a torrid romance novel disguised as a medical show. It's not even the recently departed ER, which broke television ground with its realistic gore. It's Scrubs.After seven seasons on NBC and an eighth on ABC, the series airs tonight what might be its final episode. If it returns next fall—"a coin flip," at this point, creator Bill Lawrence told me—it will feel like a different show, tracking familiar characters but at a different stage in their lives and careers. Scrubs follows the travails of doctors John "J.D." Dorian (Zach Braff), Christopher Turk (Donald Faison), and Elliot Reed (Sarah Chalke), who launched their careers in 2001 as interns at the fictional Sacred Heart Hospital.To the layman, the half-hour sitcom may hardly seem like a paragon of factual accuracy. Its approach isn't realist or vérité—on the contrary, it's essentially a live-action cartoon, filled with fantasy cut-aways, bathroom humor, sex jokes, and jiggy dances. At any moment, a Sacred Heart physician might imagine sick patients ballroom dancing through the ward or a scowling malpractice lawyer strutting through the waiting room and tossing out business cards like a blackjack dealer. J.D., meanwhile, has been known to contemplate a tough medical decision while stroking Justin, his stuffed "soul-searching unicorn."This probably doesn't sound like any hospital you've visited. But if you look past the cartoonishness, you find a series that's quite in tune with the real lives of doctors—and unlike your typical medical drama, one that's not required to end each episode with a climactic surgical procedure or whiz-bang diagnosis. ER, for instance, was about the heroic things doctors do to save lives, and every episode was rife with calamity. Scrubs, on the other hand, is mostly about what happens at hospitals between crises—the way doctors and nurses handle ordinary cases. And doctors say that as a depiction of the residency process, the show hits strikingly familiar emotional notes. J.D. narrates nearly every episode in a voice-over, setting up jokes and transitions between bits, but also describing his thoughts and insecurities. Doctors say they recognize in J.D.'s internal monologue the real thought processes of a young doctor at work."He says exactly what a resident feels, day in or day out. 'Am I hurting the patient? Am I learning what I should? Am I kissing up too much to the attending?' " says Jonathan Samuels, an attending rheumatologist at the NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases. "I always thought Scrubs was right on."If the show feels like somebody's real-life experience, that's probably because it is. Creator Bill Lawrence, the man behind Spin City, Clone High, and the upcoming Cougar Town, built Scrubs around stories from his college friend Jonathan Doris, now a cardiologist in Los Angeles and a medical adviser to the show. He found humor in Doris' experiences, he says, and also a truth about human nature that's not often seen in medical shows. "In television, we like our doctors to be very heroic and very dramatic, and they kick doors open, and they say the word stat a lot," Lawrence says. But: "If your buddy was a funny kind of goofball that made jokes out of everything in college, then as a doctor, he's the same guy."Some moments from Doris' residency found their way directly onto Scrubs, says Dr. Paul Pirraglia, an internist in Providence, R.I., who was part of Doris' Brown University resident class. In the pilot, J.D. performs a procedure called a paracentesis to drain fluid from a patient's distended belly; he turns away for a moment, then looks back to discover a geyser of fluid gushing into the air. It happened—just like that—to a fellow resident at Brown. Lawrence says Doris, like the fictional J.D., also hid in a closet early in his residency to avoid being the first doctor on the scene when a patient was coding.In fact, Lawrence says, nearly every medical scenario on the show has originated with a real-life situation, tweaked a little bit for drama and the constraints of half-hour comedy. Each year, he assigns his writers to interview five doctors and report back with story ideas. Doctors often volunteer funny stories as well, he says, though many of them involve objects that patients manage to insert in their rear ends—a plotline Lawrence and his crew could use only once. (For Scrubs purposes, it was a light bulb.)But Pirraglia and other doctors say what makes Scrubs resonate isn't the specific scenarios so much as the broader themes. The show tracks the tensions between surgical and internal medicine residents—the jocks vs. the chess club, as J.D. puts it in the pilot. It captures the allure of private practice—in Season 6, Elliot takes that route and enjoys the fruits of an inflated salary. It explores the risks and rewards of intra-hospital romance, through the on-again, off-again relationship between Elliot and J.D.—which is currently quite on. It dramatizes the ways hospitals struggle to allocate resources—Dr. Kelso, Sacred Heart's chief of medicine, has more than once ordered a patient without insurance to go untreated. And it pokes fun at the way residents jockey to get plum assignments—in one episode, residents race down a hallway like Pamplona bulls for the right to treat a member of the hospital board, trampling one another and several patients in the process.Even these fantasy sequences can be seen as an element of the show's verisimilitude, suggesting a sort of survival tactic, a way to endure the grueling rhythms of life on 36-hour shifts. Scrubs captures the agony of hunger and fatigue those shifts force doctors to endure, says Dr. Svetlana Krasnokutsky, another attending rheumatologist at NYU and Samuels' fiancee. (Hospital romance does happen in real life; there's hope for J.D. and Elliot yet.) She recalls watching a Scrubs doctor eat food off a comatose patient's tray. Krasnokutsky says she's never gone that far, but she's thought about it.Krasnokutsky says she, too, identifies with J.D.'s constant self-reflection and self-doubt. In the pilot, J.D. declares, "I don't know jack," and the show in many ways has been an ongoing exposition of that point. Residents often feel like they know nothing, Pirraglia says, yet they're suddenly invested with huge amounts of responsibility, expected to give orders to much-more-experienced nurses, required to make quick decisions with life-or-death consequences."Being a resident is a strange place between officially being a doctor, which you are, but also really not knowing it all," he says. "You get this level of authority that you don't think you deserve. All of a sudden you're the doctor and people are going to listen to you."What helps—and also comes through on Scrubs, he says—is the support of fellow doctors. A seminal moment in his own residency came when he was called to a patient with a serious gastrointestinal bleed. Blood poured over the table. Time was running out. And suddenly, the room was filled with fellow residents, offering unsolicited help. Over and over again, even when they're mired in hospital politics or a relationship squabble, Elliot and J.D. do the same for each other. In the Season 4 episode "My Office," they snipe at each other relentlessly after being named co-chief residents. But when a patient codes, they work together without a second thought. "The best thing about this place," J.D. says in his voice-over, "is that when somebody's really in trouble, all the pettiness melts away."Despite the dogged efforts of the medical staff, however, the patients on the show sometimes die anyway—sometimes because the Scrubsdoctors have made fatal mistakes. Scrubs isn't a procedural built around dramatic recoveries, and many of the episodes, as goofy as they are, end on notes that are wistful or just plain sad. "You never promise a patient they're gonna be fine," the abrasive Dr. Cox growls to J.D. in the Season 4 episode "My Best Moment." "God hates doctors. He truly does. …"That case had a happy outcome—it was a Christmas episode, after all. Unflinching as it often is, Scrubs also maintains an unabashedly sentimental perspective on medicine. That could well be something else that doctors love about the show and a reason Lawrence is asked to speak at medical school graduations. J.D and his colleagues may be by turns blustery and mired in secret self-doubt, but they're also uniformly human and well-meaning; even the supposedly hard-hearted, penny-pinching Dr. Kelso has turned out to be a softie in the end. God might hate doctors, but Scrubs loves them, and the feeling is mutual.Script DoctorsJun 07, 2012 | MD Magazine Staff.Since at least the 1950s, medical dramas have been a staple of television programming—and for good reason. Where else are the stark realities of life and death more vividly experienced than in the work of doctors and other medical professionals? Few television writers and producers have a background in medicine, though, so MDs have been enlisted as consultants to help lend these programs a sense of reality. To find out what it takes to help produce medical dramas that are both accurate and entertaining, we spoke with consultants from two of the most popular examples of the genre in recent decades: House and ER.If you’re interested in working as a consultant on a medical show, it generally comes down to who you know. Harley Liker, MD, MBA, helped his friend and neighbor, television producer David Shore, sketch out the cast of characters for a new show Shore was developing that would center on solving medical mysteries—and ended up as a consultant on House from its first season on. Greg Moran, MD, who did a residency in emergency medicine and a fellowship in infectious diseases, started out feeding ideas for odd maladies to a friend from his residency program at USC who was a consultant on ER and went on to become a consultant himself for the show’s final five seasons. Compared with Liker and Moran, Lisa Sanders, MD, took a slightly unorthodox route to her position as a consultant on House: Her monthly Diagnosis column in the New York Times Magazine, which explains how physicians sleuth out difficult cases, was an inspiration for the show and has served as the basis for a number of its episodes.Once on board, medical show consultants generally keep their day jobs. Although Moran’s friend, who got a film degree in addition to an MD, moved up the ranks and ultimately became an executive producer of ER, most consultants are strictly part-time. “It was a side thing,” says Moran, who is vice chair of emergency medicine at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center and a professor of medicine at UCLA. “It was a few hours a week.” When the work comes through, however, it has to be attended to quickly. “No matter what’s happening in my life, when a script comes, I have to drop everything and look at it, because I only have 48 hours to make suggestions on how to fix it,” says Sanders, an assistant professor of medicine in the internal medicine and primary care program at the Yale School of Medicine.Medical consultants are just one part of a complicated apparatus, and their feedback can have significant consequences for others involved in making the show. “The scripts get moving pretty quickly, and there is a whole production cycle of when a script gets released to the time it needs to be revised to the time it gets to the actors to the time it gets to the special effects and props people so they can get what they need,” says Liker, who is an associate clinical professor of medicine at UCLA and provides concierge medical services through his company, Liker Consulting. “Say I had to give a writer a note or comment where I thought that the patient absolutely needed to have an MRI and imagine there wasn’t a reproduction of an MRI machine on the set and they are going to have to go out and get one—you can’t do that in a day.”The basic role of the consultant is to help ensure that the medical details of each episode are accurate—pointing out when a drug that is only available orally is scripted to be delivered intravenously, for instance—and help the writers imagine how medical scenarios might play out. On ER, Moran would generally receive an outline of an episode script with broad sketches of what was to happen in each scene and then write a first draft of the medical sections. This might involve coming up with a plausible dispute between two characters over how to approach a particular case. On House, consultants vet scripts for medical accuracy and play a role in coming up with the ultimate diagnosis for each episode as well as the false leads that the physicians might pursue in trying to treat it.“It’s a 60-minute show, and in the first 45 or 50 minutes, you basically want to distract the viewer,” says Liker. “Maybe it’s a pneumonia, OK, let’s treat it with antibiotics. Oh, we treated for pneumonia, but he’s not getting better, so maybe it’s something else. And I think they needed a lot of help with the something elses and how to step through to get to the end.”When working on a television show, however, consultants learn to balance absolute verisimilitude against the need to tell a good story. One challenge is working with a limited cast, which means that characters might be shown performing a procedure that is far outside their normal area of practice. “For instance, you’ve got someone like Chase [on House] who is trained as a pulmonary critical care expert occasionally doing neurosurgery,” says Liker. “That would never happen. Only a neurosurgeon would do neurosurgery.” And, of course, there is House’s central character, the famously cantankerous yet brilliant Gregory House, MD, who cuts ethical corners, disregards patients’ treatment preferences, and berates colleagues and patients alike, all in the pursuit of the greater good. “In internal medicine, we spend a lot of time teaching our residents how to behave properly on the theory that if you’re good to your patients, you have a much, much better chance of getting the whole story,” says Sanders. “So there are a whole bunch of people who do primary care who just hate House because he has such a terrible bedside manner.”Moran acknowledges that the drama was frequently amped up much higher on ER than it was in a real-life emergency room, but takes pride in how the show managed to have physicians and other medical staff use the sort of medical language they would in reality. “We would have to find a way to make it self-explanatory so the audience could tell what was going on, but we would use all the technical jargon,” he says. “That was just part of the feel of the show—that the docs and the nurses were speaking in the way that they would in the real world.” Another mark of ER’s realism: Some patients actually died. “That really is more reflective of the real-world situation,” Moran says. “A lot of patients do die. Clearly the outcomes on ER overall were better than in the real world, but they didn’t always have to have a happy ending.”Sanders says that House’s writers and producers are generally eager to incorporate her suggestions for correcting errors to help make the show as accurate as possible, although there was one notable exception—the time she challenged a writer’s description of an infection in a man’s mouth as “bacterial vaginosis,” meant to imply that he had been engaged in oral-genital contact. “I sent this long email saying that, first of all, that organism doesn’t grow in the mouth, but even if it did, it wouldn’t be called ‘bacterial vaginosis’ because it’s not in the vagina, so it would be called oral stomatitis or something, and then I gave a few other suggestions that would convey that kind of contact in a funny way,” she says. “Twenty minutes later, the answer came back, and it was just one line: ‘Thanks, Lisa, but my way is funnier.’ And, you know, it was. I thought, ‘Oh, right, I get that.’ It’s nice to be accurate, but sometimes it’s also good to get off a really good joke.”In the end, as Liker points out, the shows belong to the writers and the producers, not the consultants. “The writers come up with the ideas, and the medical consultants help them shape those ideas to create stories that will be compelling and as technically accurate as possible given the understanding that the show is a drama and not meant to represent pure reality,” he says. “It’s like somebody builds a beautiful car, and we shine the chrome to make it a little brighter, but we’re not building the car.”- See more at: Script Doctors