In the almost total darkness, rare bluish lights shed light on the gestures of doctors making an autopsy on a supposedly deceased patient, who wakes up in the middle of loperation, discovering with terror the spectacle. Does this scene tell you something? It’s normal: it is taken from an episode of Dr Housethe successful American series. A funny or frightening scene (we let you choose), but above all completely disconnected from reality.
It is a constant in American series. Autopsies, a flagship moment of many scenes, are both the most exposed medical procedure on the screen and one of the most poorly represented. Eccentric lawers, clandestine autopsies, investigators manipulating unprotected bodies: everyone does almost anything, anyhow. Of Dr House has Bones by the way Expertsthe medical act is at best dramatized, at worst completely reinvented.
Nothing to make a hay? On the contrary. According to The Atlantic, these biased and widely used representations are increasingly discouraging the bereaved families to use this procedure. At the end of the race, it is a fundamental medical act which is abandoned, until being less well understood and explained by the interns themselves.
Downward autopsies, increasing problem
In the United States, for example, the autopsies rate fell by more than half between 1972 and 2007, reaching only 8.3%. A trend that would be even more marked in other countries, especially in the United Kingdom, where we are already talking about an extinction practice. If some families refuse autopsy due to cultural taboos or out of respect for the body of the deceased, many turn away from it for lack of knowledge or information. Faced with this uncertainty, they rely on media representations and television series.
However, autopsy is not only a post-mortem examination. Such a surgical procedure makes it possible to determine the cause of death, in particular to improve medical knowledge and better take care of living patients. For example, it makes it possible to detect hereditary diseases, unmatched disorders or to reveal a cause of dementia initially attributed wrongly to Alzheimer.
The act in itself has nothing to do with what the television series show: it is carried out with respect, precision and rigor, in perfectly lit rooms and according to strict protocols, where each member of the medical staff is equipped from head to toe.
Unlike the shortcuts taken in fictions, the examination is not just a simple ocular inspection of an organ before replacing it, but to an in -depth analysis of the pathologies of the body. Everything is then done so that the traces of the autopsy are invisible during a funeral ceremony.
