History Main / ArtisticLicenseMedicine

* An episode of ''Series/HermansHead'' played into the myth that sugar is 100% fatal to diabetics. Part of the story involved Herman giving a bear a donut and then finding out later that the bear was diabetic and died a short time later. Note that even if the myth were true, an animal as large as a bear would need a ''lot'' more sugar than one donut could contain to affect its glucose level significantly.

* ''Series/DonkeyHodie'': In the episode "Cheesy Con", Donkey is told to rest and stay off her hoof after spraining her hoof on a toy truck. In real life, you can still walk on a sprained foot, or if it's a really bad sprain, perform activities with the assistance of a wheelchair.

* WesternAnimation/HowToTrainYourDragon: [[spoiler: Hiccup's loss of his leg]] at the end is simplified and streamlined in several ways:

* Turns up in the backstory of Tyranno Kenzan in ''Anime/YuGiOhGX''. While on an archaeological expedition when he was younger, Tyranno fell and broke his leg. Rather than do something completely unreasonable like getting him to a hospital, they performed an on-site surgery to replace his broken bone with that of a dinosaur that they had dug up. Not even getting into how they just [[ContrivedCoincidence happened to find a dinosaur bone the exact size and shape of the shin-bone of a maybe ten-year-old boy]], or how fossils of bones don't actually contain any bone (it's converted to rock in the fossilisation process).

* Medical dramas or medical scenarios on non-medical shows often have scenes that in RealLife would violate patient confidentiality --loved ones being present when the doctor asks questions or delivers news, etc.
* {{Police Procedural}}s are especially fond of having cops barging into a doctor's office, exam room, or even an operating room to arrest the physician in question, something that would not only violate the patient's privacy but contaminate the area.

* In ''FanFic/TravelsOfTheTrifecta'' when Paul faints after the Canalave Gym battle, he stays unconscious for at least a few hours, which would be an abnormally long time in real life and would be a sign of something much more severe than exhaustion and influenza/severe cold. [[spoiler: Possibly justified by his terminal chronic illness that is revealed later on in the story, although this instance still stands out as unusual when compared to the other times in the story when he is rendered unconscious. In Chapter 10, for example, he wakes up from Mars knocking him out in a much quicker amount of time.]]

* In an in-Verse example, Dean on ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'' once explained away his having fired a gun in his girlfriend's garage by claiming he'd seen a possum and knew they carried rabies. Due to their low body temperature, opossums are the ''least'' likely North American backyard mammals to harbor the rabies virus, something any doctor who knows about rabies ''or'' exterminator who knows possums would be aware of. {{Justified}} because Dean ''was'' an "exterminator", but [[HunterOfMonsters of the paranormal variety]] rather than the vermin variety.
* ''Series/ViennaBlood'': {{Justified}} due to the show being a PeriodDrama set in mid-1900s Austria. Max, part of the main {{Buddy Cop|Show}} duo, is portrayed as thoughtful and enlightened for his belief in and use of Freudian psychology and the "talking cure". His supervising physician Gruner is portrayed as a brutal torturer for his use of electric shock therapy. In the show, it's ambiguous whether Max or Gruner was more effective at treating Amelia's dissociative disorder (though the framing supports Max since it's his story). Modern medical science has shown ECT to be really useful for quite a few mental conditions when properly performed (i.e. with muscle relaxants and anesthesia, as opposed to just hooking the patient's head up to a voltage source the way Gruner does it), while Freudian psychology, though the forerunner of modern cognitive behavioral therapy, is now dismissed as mostly nonsense.

May be related to ArtisticLicenseBiology or ArtisticLicenceAnatomy. See also ArtisticLicensePharmacology, and MedicalTreatmentTropes.

* ''Fanfic/ApprenticeAndPregnant'': [[spoiler:Applefur]] is a cat who suffers from delusions. To help with the hallucinations, her [[TheMedic medicinecat]] tells her to eat a mixture of poppy seeds and yew leaves every day. This wouldn't do anything in real life and is more likely to make a cat ill than anything.

* ''LightNovel/SwordArtOnline'': The "Mother's Rosario" arc (volume 7 of the book series, last third of season 2 of the anime) deals with Asuna befriending Konno Yuuki, a sick girl who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion given to her mother during a C-section. While it is medically possible to get HIV from a transfusion, it's anachronistic enough to be extremely unlikely: this would have happened in 2010 given the in-universe dates. Blood centers began testing donations for HIV-1 in 1985 and the rarer HIV-2 strain in 1992, and the practice has only been intensified in the years since. [[https://www.redcrossblood.org/biomedical-services/blood-diagnostic-testing/blood-testing.html According to the Red Cross]], at time of writing your chance of getting even the commoner strain this way is about 1 in 2 million.

* ''Series/TheLordOfTheRingsTheRingsOfPower'': During the invasion of the Southlands, Bronwyn gets hit with an arrow from behind, getting pierced through the chest, on the left side. First, a bow-and-arrow setup can't adequately penetrate the heavy bone like the scapula, and even less the head of the arrow to come out on the other side, it can only puncture the lungs. Anyway, Bronwyn loses a lot of blood, and asks her son to take the arrow out of her chest, because otherwise, she will die. Remember that she is a healer with supposed medicine knowledge. Anyone with basic medicine knowledge would know that taking out the object piercing your body would only speed up the hemorrhage, but this can be an AcceptableBreakFromReality, because Bronwyn's wound is sealed immediately with elfirine seeds, known to have magical healing properties. She also recovers fast for a human, only a few hours later, she is back on her feet, celebrating, and suffering no repercussions like septicemia, breathing problems, lungs flooded with blood, or at least a crippling pain that should keep her in bed for days until she recovers.

* An episode of ''Series/HermansHead'' played into the myth that sugar is 100% fatal to diabetics. Part of the story involved Herman giving a bear a donut and then finding out later that the bear was diabetic and died a short time later. Note that even if the myth were true, an animal as large as a bear would need a ''lot'' more sugar than one donut could contain to affect its glucose level significantly.

* ''WesternAnimation/PeppaPig'': In "Not Very Well", Dr. Brown Bear makes a house call just for a skin rash. Real life doctors only make house calls if the situation is serious.

* In ''Film/BeforeTheDevilKnowsYoureDead'', when [[spoiler: Andy]] is on a hospital bed, the leads to the EKG unit are completely misplaced. They're not a bit off - they look like they were slapped on by someone just trying to make things look medic-... Oh, yeah. When they are moved to another person, they are similarly slapped on incorrectly. This kind of thing normally triggers an alarm if the machine thinks the leads are misplaced or the rhythm detected by the machine is way off. Nothing sensible would come out from simply putting the leads in the wrong places, likely triggering an alarm, though [[TruthInTelevision hospital staff don't always react to an alarm with the urgency you'd hope]].

* EasySexChange: Transitioning takes years of therapy, including hormone treatments; it simply isn't possible for Alice to have a single operation and wake up as Bob (or vice versa). Also, unless someone was born with a working uterus and ovaries, they cannot become pregnant or have periods.

* In ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12573127/1/Under-the-weather Under the Weather]]'' (based on ''Film/Ghostbusterrs1984''), not only does it play CatchYourDeathOfCold straight, but Egon has a fever of 104 despite only having a cold (in real life, colds only cause a fever of 102 at the highest) and when [[HereWeGoAgain Janine catches his cold]], she has watery eyes, which are more a symptom of allergies than a cold.

* CasualCrucifixtion: Being crucified is far easier to recover from than it should be.

May be related to ArtisticLicenseBiology. See also ArtisticLicensePharmacology, and MedicalTreatmentTropes.

* ''Series/{{Fargo}}'': A gunshot Hanzee steals hydrogen peroxide to disinfect his wounds. It's a common misconception that hydrogen peroxide should be used for wound disinfection, probably because it ''is'' used for sterilization, but it actually slows down wound healing.

* ''Series/{{House}}'' often features chemotherapeutic drugs as a single "chemo" chemical that you just give a patient to kill any cancer that might be anywhere in the body. In reality, chemo can use alkylating agents, antimetabolites, anthracyclines, plant alkaloids, topoisomerase inhibitors, or any number of other chemicals, and it all depends on the specific type of tumor.
** Interestingly enough, there are often multiple treatments for the same type of tumor, depending on allergic reactions and bodily tolerance. (read: some are more toxic than others, and God help you if you turn out to be allergic.)
** In one episode of ''Series/{{House}}'', we see a patient ripping out his cochlear implant -- cue spurting blood and frantic attempts to save his life. In real life, the external parts of the device (the microphone and speech processor) are held on magnetically, with the actual implant itself safely under the skin. Deaf people and hearing itinerants remove them all the time. It's the equivalent of someone tearing their eyes out by removing their glasses. [[note]]Some of the earliest experimental implants did have the external components physically connected. As this requires leaving a gaping hole in the patient's flesh, they don't do that anymore. Chances are that any of the recipients of those early prototypes are either dead of old age, or have upgraded to a newer model.[[/note]]
** The series has repeatedly shown the OR with dark, dramatic lighting. While there are some cases [[note]]When a surgeon is using a camera attached to a scope, the lights in the room are usually dimmed to prevent glare on the monitor so that the surgeon can see the images.[[/note]] where this would happen, the truth is that OR rooms are brightly lit in the majority of cases.

** The series usually offers up a real howler at least once per episode, of the kind you don't even need medical education to notice. Toxoplasmosis? A fungus (in reality, a disease caused by parasitic protozoa). ALS? Affects sensory neurons (there's a reason it's also known as "'''motor''' neuron disease"). Unnoticed tumors 30 ''centimeters'' in diameter (larger than a basketball). Etc.

** Apparently, [[UnfortunateImplications asexuality doesn't exist in healthy people]] [[note]]despite an estimated seventy ''million'' people being asexual in RealLife[[/note]], is the same thing as absent libido[[note]]it's not--it's the absence of sexual ''attraction'', not the inability to get horny. However, the absence of libido ''can'' be a sign of other medical problems[[/note]] and can be caused by tumors.

** In [[Recap/ColumboS02E07 one episode]], the hospital requests that the patient's assistant go to his hotel room to retrieve his usual medications. In reality, no hospital would do this as it would be a monumental waste of time- they'd either likely have the drugs on hand or would be able to get them from a nearby pharmacy.
*** They ''might'', however, make such a request if they didn't have a patient's records and no one was sure what medications they were taking. That's one reason it's a good idea to keep your prescriptions in their original bottles, all in one place, and bring them along to any appointment involving a new doctor.

* EasySexChange: Transitioning takes months of therapy, including hormone treatments; it simply isn't possible for Alice to have a single operation and wake up as Bob (or vice versa). Also, unless someone was born with a working uterus and ovaries, they cannot become pregnant or have periods.
* ElectroconvulsiveTherapyIsTorture: Electroconvulsive Therapy has been performed safely for decades. It's also been shown to be a positive treatment for several mental illnesses. Also, unlike the fictional depictions, the patient is quietly asleep while it happens, thanks to muscle relaxants and short-term anesthetics.