Essay On How A Nurse's Image Affects Your Health

As a fan of medical dramas on television, I know from firsthand experience how much the media can affect a person’s outlook towards the subjects, character roles, and individual cases presented in each show. I personally love the fast-paced medical dramas; the doctors within each episode demonstrating their brilliance in the medial field, heroically saving the lives of their patients, while simultaneously dealing with the apparent drama and troubles that arise due to their hospital settings, and all within the incredible one hour time slot allotted for them on T.V. However, after reading the article “How Nursing’s Image Affects Your Health”, the authors, Sandy and Harry Jacobs Summers, clearly and effectively demonstrated multiple misconceptions

As the authors on numerous occasions enforced, in T.V. shows, I too usually equate the doctor as the primary care giver to the patient in each case. One statement by the authors especially struck me: in the show Grey’s Anatomy, the nurse functioning as an on-hand consultant for the actors “shows the actors playing physicians how to do important things nurses really do, and lends an air of realism to a show that portrays her profession as trivial” (17). The only appearances I usually witness on television by nurses usually fit into the authors’ identification as the “mute handmaiden” (9) or “peripheral subordinates” (17) role; appearing behind the doctor, just fixing an IV, or handing over some medical documents for the doctor to actually analyze and then dramatically diagnose. Upon some further reflection after reading, I realize that even in reality I tend to envision nurses as more or less assistants to doctors or physicians in the clinical setting. I certainly agree that this is in part due to how poorly they are presented in the media. Thus the authors’ statement that media does negatively impact nurses image is something I strongly identify