Medical blog

In between long shifts working amid blood and broken bones at Lawrence General Hospital's emergency room, Dr. Irv Danesh is jet-setting to television film sets, arranging medical props, and teaching actors how to use a stethoscope and perform a basic physical exam.
As a medical consultant for a TV show in development for the USA Network, the 52-year-old New York native uses his knowledge from 25 years of experience in the emergency room to help the writers and producers make the faux medical backdrop and plot lines as close to reality as possible.
Last October, Danesh, the associate director of emergency medicine at Lawrence General, met Hollywood script writer An drew Lenchewski while attending his sister-in-law's wedding on the West Coast. Lenchewski was writing the script for a medical drama, "Royal Pains," and asked Danesh to help him with some of the medical jargon.
Most television script writers, like Lenchewski, don't know what the standard treatment for a hemophiliac is, what hospital nurses wear in a catheterization lab, or how to perform a pericardial window for a cardiac patient. That's why they hire a behind-the-scenes doctor, like Danesh, to proofread.
"It was an excellent script but the medical stuff needed work," Danesh explained. Over the next six months the two exchanged e-mails, writing and rewriting scenes and tweaking the medical details until they were just right. Danesh called upon cases from his years as an emergency physician at hospitals in Massachusetts and California for ideas to use in different episodes.
The ER at Lawrence General sees 65,000 cases every year. For Danesh, that's a lot of material. He has seen everything from antifreeze poisoning in a 17-month-old to a man whose chest was sliced open with a machete.
Lenchewski was so impressed by his experience that he asked Danesh to help out on the set. During filming at a bankrupt hospital in Brooklyn, the ER doc picked out scrubs, strategically placed fake IVs, and advised makeup artists on the correct skin tone of a patient feeling faint. He even took photos on his iPhone of the Lawrence nurses to show the costumers.
Danesh tried to avoid mistakes like those made in other medicine-based TV shows. For example, in the opening montage of "Scrubs," he says, a chest X-ray is shown upside down, and in most of the popular medical dramas, such as "ER" and "Grey's Anatomy," the on-screen doctors can't even perform a simple physical exam.
According to Danesh, "Royal Pains" draws its stories from real diseases and medical maladies but gives them a twist, much like his own personal favorite TV show, the Fox series "House." However, unlike "House," "Royal Pains" is not your typical hospital-doctor based medical drama.