Paging Dr. Vane: Dissecting Hollywood’s Medical Mayhem at Comic-Con
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He is a doctor, he has played one on TV, and this week he is preparing to present his seventh Comic-Con panel as the annual event converges on downtown San Diego.
Jackson Vane, M.D., assistant clinical professor in the UC San Diego School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics and informatics director for the Emergency Department at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, co-hosts Hi Everybody! A Bad Medicine Podcast, with Johnny Kolasinski, and other physician special guests. Their panel at Comic-Con is slated for Saturday, July 26.
While in medical school, Vane discovered that for many people, television shows are considered a reliable source of general health care information and education. When television shows get medical experiences and events critically wrong it can be shocking to learn that what was presented on TV is not really how things happen in real clinical settings.
“During my fourth year of medical school, my friends and I spent a whole month watching TV and kind of breaking down medical scenes and then seeing how real it was versus how not real it was. It became a fun project of mine,” he said.
Those medical school conversations with friends led to the birth of the podcast and an attempt to secure a spot at Comic-Con. In their initial application, they described their concept as a panel discussion talking about bad medicine in movies and television in a fun and sarcastic way.
“The people at Comic-Con opened the door for us and let us in, we’ve been doing the same format every year since,” said Vane.
Vane recently sat down with the School of Medicine and shared his experience as a Comic-Con panelist.
This year’s panel is called, RiNickulous Cage: Bad Medicine in Nick Cage Films. How did you select Nicholas Cage for this year’s subject?
Last year, we discussed the many deaths of Sean Bean. If you're not familiar Sean Bean, he played Eddard “Ned” Stark in Game of Thrones. In the show, Ned gets beheaded. If you watched The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, he played Boromir, who also dies. Basically, the running theme is he dies in everything that he's in. So, we watched a bunch of movies where he died in very dramatic fashions and broke down Sean Bean’s various scenes during the panel. People seemed to really like it.
For this year, we were thinking about which actors are just as bombastic and have a very wide catalog for us to select from. That’s how we came up with Nicholas Cage. We have a list of 10 or 15 movies, we really need to cut it down before Saturday. You have your classics like Face/Off and The Wicker Man, where we’ll talk about bee stings. One of my panelists mentioned Ghost Rider, which is where his skull is on fire, so we’ll talk about burn injuries with that one. The discussion will be a combination of both good medical scenes, and then just very silly things. Based on social media reaction so far, people seem to be really excited about this one.
Are there any shows or movies that you think do a good job of accurately portraying medicine?
Scrubs is always the one that everyone says is the best, which I agree with. It’s not so much about the medicine in Scrubs, but rather the relationships between the nurses, doctors, techs and all the other specialties. That is pretty realistic stuff. Nip/Tuck was pretty realistic in its portrayal of medicine. Crank (A 2006 action film) was not. Code Black (a television series that ran from 2015-2018) was actually pretty realistic. It portrayed how stressful it can be in the emergency room when it’s overloaded, and you have nowhere to see patients.
I read that you’ve played a doctor on television. Tell us about your experience being on the screen.
It was when I was in fellowship, a TV show called The Night Shift was looking for doctors or medical professionals to play background actors. I applied, and they cast me as an anesthesiologist.
During filming, I got in trouble for correcting an actor on how to pronounce certain medical terms correctly. Then they had some X-rays backwards and I suggested they flip it because it looked silly. There was also scene where I was an emergency room doctor and they had me running back and forth. I told them we do not run in the emergency room. I thought my suggestions would make them upset, but they kept me around on set, which was fun. During filming, I learned why some creative decisions were made to bring more tension and drama into the scene. It helped me understand some of why they do certain things on TV.
I was a contestant on The Price is Right about 10 years ago and I’ve also been on a couple of trivia shows. The most recent one was a show called Master Minds, which is a very niche game, but I competed against trivia masters, and I met Ken Jennings, which was cool.
What is your favorite television show or movie?
That’s pretty easy for me –Scrubs. It was my feel-good show during medical school, when things kind of got bogged down. Watching the show was just the thing that kind of re-energized you and made you feel better. I’m a big comedy person and movie-wise, I like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Recently I've been watching a show called Taskmaster, which is a British gameshow about comedians being silly and doing menial tasks. I'm not a big drama person, but really like Severance. We actually did a podcast episode inspired by the show about chip implantation and how it would cause so much damage to have a chip like that implanted into the brain.
What are you most looking forward to this weekend at Comic-Con?
I'm excited just to be around the whole event again. It's almost overwhelming because there's so much going on. I like to just kind of see the big displays that the studios have built, and all the random things they have on the exhibit floor. I’d like to attend one of the bigger panels, but attendees sometimes line up overnight to get in. There are no special perks as a host of a panel, but overall, I am looking forward to hosting my panel and experiencing the entire event again this year.
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