parenting – medhum.org https://medhum.org Cultivating empathy & critical thinking in health, culture & the arts Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:31:51 +0000 en hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.3 https://medhum.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/cropped-medhum-logo-300-e1715809791117-32x32.png parenting – medhum.org https://medhum.org 32 32 The Names by Florence Knapp and Flashlight by Susan Choi  https://medhum.org/review/book-review/howard_trachtman/the-names-by-florence-knapp-and-flashlight-by-susan-choi/ https://medhum.org/review/book-review/howard_trachtman/the-names-by-florence-knapp-and-flashlight-by-susan-choi/#respond Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:34:13 +0000 https://medhum.org/?p=11717 These two books share a common point of departure. Both begin abruptly on the first few pages with a discrete life-altering event and then follow through on the extended ramifications of the narrative trigger. But despite the similar beginning and framing device, the novels differ markedly in structure and emotional tone.  

The Names opens with a woman, Cora, accompanied by her very talkative 9-year-old daughter Maia, on her way to register her newborn baby son and officially name him. She is married to an abusive husband who expects her to name him Gordon, the name that has been given by long-standing family tradition to every first-born son. Knapp immediately confounds expectation by then splitting the narrative into three distinct streams. She creates a novelistic triptych based on whether Cora, in fact, submits and names the baby Gordon, uses a charming alternative, Bear, offered by her chatty daughter, or substitutes a name of her own choosing, Julian, that she hopes will honor and be appreciated by her husband even if it represents a break in the line of Gordons.  The choice of each one  of these three names results in a distinctly different narrative arc that emerges over the 35-year span of the book. In the Gordon stream, Cora and her children  remain trapped in the tense and hostile domestic environment. In the second, Bear version, Cora accepts her daughter’s suggestion for a name. When her  husband returns from work that day, he goes berserk  and, in a rage, commits a savage murder. He is imprisoned and the mother and children achieve some degree of independence. Finally, in the third, Julian, narrative, where Cora gives the baby the name of her choosing, the husband grows increasingly violent and kills his wife a few years later. The children end up being raised by their maternal grandmother in Ireland and are forced to grapple with the untimely loss of both parents. 

Flashlight is the story of a Korean man, Serk, who leaves his native country as a child with his family for a better life in Japan and grows up there. He moves to the United States as a young man​,​  marries a beautiful but mysterious woman, Anne, from the Midwest, and is hired to join the science faculty of a small mid-level college. They have a precocious daughter, Louisa, who is an amalgam of her parents’ genetic input and more than match for both of them. The novel opens with Serk and the 10-year old Louisa walking along the beach in the early evening. The following morning, the girl is found unconscious and hypothermic at the water’s edge​,​ and the father has vanished. The presumption is that he slipped among the rocks jutting into the ocean, was swept away by the waves and drowned at sea. All is not, however, as it seems. There is international skullduggery involved, though it would be unfair to disclose more. Regardless of the cause of the father’s disappearance,  just as in ​The Names​, the lives of all the main characters in  ​Flashlight​ are ​ irrevocably ​changed by the sudden unexpected event at the beginning of the narrative. The mother-daughter relationship, which can be fraught in the best of circumstances, is profoundly disturbed. The mother, who suffered for many years from undiagnosed multiple sclerosis, is unable to overcome her own physical disability and achieve inner peace. The daughter, despite her obvious intellectual and physical gifts, is incapable of empathizing with others and develops a nearly feral persona. Serk’s story resurfaces in a surprising turn of events. Although there is constant switching of viewpoints and time frames, ​Flashlight​ has a more conventional structure than ​The Names​. 

​​​Why review these two books together? Doctors are taught and are obligated to treat patients one at a time. The guiding principle is that each person who seeks care should be evaluated and managed as an individual. The underlying cause of disease should be identified as precisely as possible​,​ and the therapy should be prescribed that has the highest likelihood of success and matches each patient’s expressed life goals and priorities. However, patients are almost never seen in isolation. Doctors are trained to compare and contrast the men, and women and children that they encounter, to find commonalities and differences among them in the hope that this wider, more nuanced  field of vision will sharpen their diagnostic acumen and improve their therapeutic recommendations for each patient that they treat. 

I suggest that reading these two novels together provides a literary example of how an analysis of two books that at first appear to be similar reveals different insights about the ramifications of sudden, life altering occurrences.  This is concretized by the contrasting authorial  ​​tone, warm and fuzzy in The Names versus cool and detached in Flashlight, and how we as readers engage with these two books. 

​​The Names​ details the consequences of Cora’s impulsive decision about what name she should give to her newborn son. ​Flashlight​ recounts the unspooling of the characters’ lives after one of them disappears while walking along the beach with his daughter. In ​The Names,​ the fateful event is a personal human choice, in ​Flashlight​ it is an inscrutable act by an unseen, hostile foreign government. This stark difference is manifest in the way readers experience the subsequent stories. As one moves through the 35-year span of ​The Names​, each 7-year interval in which Knapp picks up the story of the “three” sons feels organically linked to preceding period. The actions of Cora, her children, and the supporting cast of characters follow a trajectory that feels smooth and organic. It is true that while unexpected events intrude into each named narrative – Bear, Julian, and Gordon – the global sweep feels grounded and recognizable. There is admittedly a temporary sense of disorientation and a need to regain one’s footing ​in the plot ​as Knapp switches gears and advances to the next 7-year interval in the story of the triply named son. The narrative scenery and settings are abruptly changed​,​ and it can take the reader a few pages to get oriented and mentally  ​​settled. But within each tale, there is pervading tenderness and a sense of human initiative.  

In contrast, ​Flashlight​ has a staccato disjointed feel. The novel changes location and time period without clear reason. The nature of the characters, why they do what they do, and the basis for the choices they make, seem inexplicable, as if they are acting randomly and have no control over their lives. ​​Unlike the protagonists in ​The Names,​ who one wants to see overcome their difficulties, ​ and ​for whom one subconsciously roots for their ​well-being​, there is a reluctance to embrace or even sympathize with the characters in ​Flashlight​. They feel remote and distant until nearly the end of the book. It is Choi’s brilliance as a writer that maintains the cohesiveness of the composition and ensures that the reader remains fully committed to the novel and motivated to ultimately understand and come to grips with the plight of the people who populate the literary world she has created. 

Occasionally, as readers, we may encounter two novels that complement one another. ​The Names​ and ​Flashlight​ fell into that circumstance for me. As a pediatrician, I was taught to try to understand the impact of primordial events on the life trajectory of my patients, how singular experiences can have long lasting repercussions for health and disease. But these events are not all the same. Some are internal, reflecting private human decisions, and others are external, reflecting trials and challenges imposed unpredictably by the outside world. The warmer narrative of ​The Names​ reflects the former circumstance while the opaque tone of ​Flashlight​ mirrors the arbitrary and cruel act that launches the story. ​For physicians, ​appreciating the disparate impact of vastly different life events on people will improve our understanding of patients’ experiences and help us provide more compassionate care. These two books, taken together, illustrate the underlying objectives of MedHum, namely, to explore how humanities can meaningfully shed light on ​the ​human experience and the practice of medicine​.

The Names  
Florence Knapp  
Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, New York  
2023, 328pp  

Flashlight 
Susan Choi 
Farrar, Straus, Giroux
2025,  450pp 

Web image created by Medhum.org

]]> https://medhum.org/review/book-review/howard_trachtman/the-names-by-florence-knapp-and-flashlight-by-susan-choi/feed/ 0 From Tigers to Otaku https://medhum.org/article/narrative/dave_hsu/from-tigers-to-otaku/ https://medhum.org/article/narrative/dave_hsu/from-tigers-to-otaku/#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2025 13:19:12 +0000 https://medhum.org/?p=11667 A Chinese City Doctor’s Notebook–Chapter Five

A few years ago, a patient of mine, a young man, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. In the middle of university, his grades suddenly nosedived, and he was found talking incoherently by his roommates, who called the police.

Not long thereafter, his mother, distraught, came to see me in the office. She told me the story of their lives. How she had struggled to raise him on her own in North America while her husband lived overseas and how she had pushed them to attend a renowned public school in the area. Now she wondered if she was to blame for the whole thing. Had she done something wrong? Had she pushed them too hard? Was this all her fault?

I’ve been practising as a family physician for Chinese Canadian immigrant patients for almost two decades, and my practice runs the gamut from newborns a few days old right on through to adulthood. Not only that, I grew up as a second generation Chinese Canadian immigrant, the son of two Chinese immigrants from Taiwan. And now I’m a parent myself, raising the third generation of Chinese Canadian immigrants. After all this, I feel like I should know a thing or two about Chinese immigrant parenting but the truth isn’t so simple. It’s probably closer to truth to say that Chinese immigrant parenting is something that I have lived through and have many strange and conflicted feelings about.

There is definitely a playbook that Chinese Canadian immigrant parents subscribe to. The playbook is an extension of the Chinese immigrant workhorse mentality. When you come to a country with nothing but hope and work ethic, you somehow create an ethos built around filial piety, discipline, and a strong sense of duty. This parenting model, tried, tested and true, reads something like this:

  • A heavy emphasis on academics and education, with emphasis placed especially on mathematics and sciences.
  • A high level of parental expectations.
  • Combining the above two points creates the expectation that when it comes to your academics, you will outwork your lazy, North American counterparts
  • A carefully curated collection of after school activities, always including some attempt at playing a classical music instrument. Even here, you will outwork your lazy, North American counterparts.
  • Going to university. Once in university, you will once again, outwork your lazy, North American counterparts.
  • Landing a well-paying job, preferably as a professional in the big three (doctor, lawyer, engineer). If not, then business. In all these fields, you will, once again, outwork your lazy, North American counterparts.

The playbook may sound draconian, but in many ways, it works. Asian immigrant children are known for succeeding academically. They make it into top university programs in large numbers, so much so that some people were worried that certain elite schools were starting to modify admission criteria to decrease Asian students’ enrollment.

Asian Americans disproportionately land jobs in medicine, law and engineering and as adults, do disproportionately well financially. All of this conveniently fits into the model minority myth. The myth says that all Asians are hardworking and reliable. They do well in school, they don’t complain, and they work hard in their upwardly mobile careers.

This heavy-handed approach to parenting gained parlance in popular culture with the publication of Amy Chua’s infamous memoir, “the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.”

Published In 2011, the book was described as a parenting memoir by Yale Law professor Amy Chua and became an international best-seller. In the book, Chua described her parenting journey, as she demanded, insisted, and pushed her children to academic and musical success. Her older daughter ends up performing at Carnegie Hall and eventually, in the years after the book was published, both daughters graduated from Harvard University.

I read the book a few years after it was published. From all the press clippings and popular discourse about the book, I had expected that the book to present a bullet proof justification for tiger parenting.  And indeed, the mother in the book was certainly recognizable to me. She was an amalgam of many of the Chinese immigrant parents I had known growing up, including some aspects of my own.

The book does in fact, describe many classic tropes of the typical Asian American parenting regimen. The disproportionate emphasis placed on learning classical music instruments, the high strung, pushy helicopter parent, the unrelenting expectation of academic success. Chua described booking family vacations only at hotels where a piano was available to be rented.

But what I did not expect was that this was only the setup of the book. In the second half of the book, Chua’s defiant younger daughter, Lulu, decides enough is enough and refuses to give in to her mother’s insistence on playing the violin. In time, she reduces her violin practice time to a measly thirty minutes a day and takes up that most un-Asian of pursuits, sports in the form of competitive tennis, and Chua concludes that the best form of parenting is neither something entirely tiger, but something in the middle, a cross between east and west.

In a culture where few people read but everyone likes to give an opinion, the book’s denouement was lost on most people. Amy Chua and the term “tiger mother” became an avatar for all the aspects of Asian American parenting that were deplorable, but few people chose to remember Chua’s tongue in cheek look at her own parenting.

Instead, the reaction of most westerners to the “tiger mother” phenomenon was one of disbelief, something along the lines of “those crazy Asian parents and their crazy parenting ideas.” But what I found most interesting was Asian people’s response to Chua’s book. Most Asian parents did not see Chua’s style of parenting as harmful or strange. Extreme, maybe, but in principle, no different from any other Asians. In my family, my cousins and I read the book and decided that our parents weren’t really tiger enough. Yes, we had been forced to play the piano and the violin. But not for six hours. Six hours! Can you believe it? Now that is crazy.

As much as I’d like to be critical of Asian American parenting, I must say that in my time with my Chinese Canadian patients, I’ve seen plenty of success stories.

I’ve had patients who find time to play both the piano and the violin while commuting an hour each day to the most elite merit based private schools in the city.

I’ve seen children who are being shuttled between all manner of competitive swimming, gymnastics and ice hockey lessons. Often, just hearing these children’s schedules is enough to make me dizzy but the families somehow make it work.

Sometimes, I’m tempted to ask the parents if it’s possible that they could just let their foot off the pedal and let their kids be kids. That’s the western upbringing in me coming out. But then I remember how in elementary school, one day my teacher asked us to tell the class what after school activities each of us was involved in. This was the late eighties, when over-parenting wasn’t really a thing yet, and I remember how my classmates howled with laughter as I rattled off all the strange extra-curricular activities my parents would be toting me to that summer: piano lessons, swimming lessons, tennis lessons, Chinese school and a cooking class. Most of my classmates were lucky to have one activity to do. I had five. At the time, I laughed along with them, finding the whole thing funny. But now, decades later, when it comes to parenting, I wonder who really gets the last laugh.

At the opposite end of the achievement spectrum, is the Otaku child. The term Otaku is Japanese and was initially a reference to Japanese youths who were obsessed with computers and popular culture. The classic example was the nerdy Japanese boy, imbibing huge quantities of Japanese anime and manga while sitting in their rooms playing video games all day. This was a mostly Asian phenomenon, rarely talked about in the west.⁠1  In the last several years though, especially since the COVID pandemic, I’ve watched as a growing number of my adolescent patients stopped attending school. I’d find out about these cases from exasperated parents, who would come to the office, often alone but sometimes accompanied by their taciturn child, seeking out a medical solution for what was going on.  

The cases had some similar themes, though none was exactly the same as the others. In most of the cases, the child did not have a strong relationship with their parents. Often they had retreated into an online world on the internet. Sometimes, online gaming was involved, but sometimes the children insisted they just surfed the internet, watching videos or engaging with social media.

Generally speaking, the children weren’t terrible students in the traditional sense of children who were really struggling academically. They were mostly strong students. Several of them were even identified as gifted.

Poor sleep habits were often an issue for these children. They’d often be on their computers into the wee hours of the morning, and then unable to wake up for class, if they bothered to attend at all. Eventually, they’d stop attending classes altogether.

The children tended to spend much of their time in their rooms, rarely interacting with the household, often not joining their families even for meals. As the frustration of the parents grew, so too would the hostilities in the household. The parents would try to break the internet addiction by withholding computer hardware or turning off the WIFI. Such escalations would be met with confrontations, leading to overturned television sets or even suicidal gestures.

The ages of the children varied. Some were as old as high school. But some were as young as middle school.

In all cases, the commonality was that the parents were stuck. They didn’t know how to proceed. And as their family physician, I didn’t know either.

When I went to medical school, school absence was not a medical diagnosis. Neither was video game addiction. But the medical and psychiatric world I was trained in did not have cell phones or social media or Facebook or TikTok. What it had was a few narrow definitions for similar behaviours: conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and substance abuse disorders. The children in these school avoidance cases fit some of these definitions, but never wholly.

I’ve watched as parents tried everything they could to find a solution for this issue within a medical system that doesn’t really know what to do with these cases. Beleaguered parents bringing their children to see me is only the first step. I’ve sent these patients to see psychiatrists and psychotherapists and paediatricians with mixed results. There isn’t much these specialists can do with an uncommunicative child who doesn’t want to be there. I’ve seen patients call the justice of the peace to issue a community treatment order so that their own child gets ordered by the courts to go to a hospital for an assessment by a psychiatrist. I’ve seen patients drag their child to the emergency room for school absence and read consult notes by well-meaning ER doctors who try their best to persuade the child to resume going to school. I’ve even been called by well-intentioned police officers, who want me to do something about the child they’ve just been dealing with, because they have no idea what they should be doing either.

Of course, school absence isn’t something that’s new or wholly unique to Chinese immigrants. I still remember my first week of high school back in 1992, watching as a classmate of mine was dropped off by his mother at the front door, and as soon as the car disappeared down the road, he turned around and headed away from the school building.

But that was high school and for whatever reason, in those days, we never thought of those kids as being “medical cases.” If you wanted to blow off classes and spend your day smoking cigarettes just off the school grounds, that was your choice. It wasn’t something you dragged your children to see a doctor about.

In fact, the “high-school dropout” has always been a known character trope, around for probably as long as organized education has existed. But there’s something especially jarring when seeing these cases of high school dropouts play out against the backdrop of tiger parenting and the model minority myth. And there’s something even more visceral to it when the issue starts to appear in middle school aged children.

I wish I could say that all of these stories of school avoidance end well. Some of them do: after a few years of feuding with their parents, the child grows up, and some go back to school. But for others, the jury is still out. I’m still waiting to see what happens.

So what does it all mean? How can well-intentioned Chinese Canadian immigrant parenting, produce such a broad spectrum of results? Super successful overachievers on the one hand, and Otaku adolescents who refuse to leave their rooms and are on suicide watch on the other?

I don’t have an answer, except to say that both of these groups of children are products of the same parenting paradigm. And just like when my patients ask me if they are to blame for their children’s mental illness, there is no real answer. There’s no way to definitively connect a line between the Asian parenting model and the types of children it produces.

But just as we can draw a line between pushy, tiger parenting and academic success, we probably can also draw a similar line between pushy, tiger parenting and Otaku children and social withdrawal. It’s easy for the Asian parenting model to claim its successes, but it’s time for the Asian parenting model to also accept some of the damage it has wrought onto its children.

Ultimately, most of my paediatric patients go through to university. The majority are in the typical model minority fields: engineering, computers, medical school and law school. 

But occasionally I’ll meet one who is studying something a bit more off the beaten path: fashion, or design, or cinema or something like that. They may be taking degrees in those programs, or they’ve pivoted after university and are making their way far off the traditional, beaten path. I’ll look at them, I’ll know that in some small way, they’ve broken out of the paradigm. I know they’re putting their parents through agony, but for what it’s worth, I’m proud of them.

1. I remember a lecture in medical school talking about the cultural basis of diseases. Certain diseases were common in the West but almost unheard of in Asia-the example of eating disorders was given. For the opposite example of diseases common in the East but rare in the West, the example given was the Japanese Otaku child.
Web image created by Medhum.org

Photo of the Hsu family in the 80s provided by Dave


Additional Chapters from A Chinese City Doctor’s Notebook

When Your Body Isn’t Yours 

When Your Body Isn’t Yours 

01.12.26 786
From Tigers to Otaku

From Tigers to Otaku

09.16.25 1659
The Happiest Couple

The Happiest Couple

07.28.25 1401
The Things We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Dying 

The Things We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Dying 

05.13.25 1979
One Patient, Two Systems 

One Patient, Two Systems 

02.24.25 2665
]]> https://medhum.org/article/narrative/dave_hsu/from-tigers-to-otaku/feed/ 2 Second Life by Amanda Hess   https://medhum.org/review/book-review/carol_schilling/second-life-by-amanda-hess/ https://medhum.org/review/book-review/carol_schilling/second-life-by-amanda-hess/#respond Tue, 09 Sep 2025 13:26:20 +0000 https://medhum.org/?p=11606 Having a Child in the Digital Age  

Before modern medicine, superstition mediated pregnancy and childbirth. Once, divine wrath or distressing mental images risked what was called a monstrous birth. To reduce risk today, pregnant women consult prophetic prenatal technologies and the ceaseless cacophony of digital media. Twice pregnant, New York Times pop culture and internet reporter Amanda Hess found herself both drawn to and repelled by media advice and the collection of data enticed by apps or insisted on during clinical encounters.  

Amanda Hess

Her book Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age—part wry memoir, part savvy investigative reporting—asks whether current technologies deliver a better, if not perfect, baby or the maternal well-being they augur. She, even more significantly, worries about the consequences, personal, relational, and ethical, of pursuing perfection.  

Hess couldn’t resist interacting with chatty, advice-giving apps. One first tracks her fertility and then, in weekly installments, shows her what a developing “creepily realistic CGI fetus” looks like. (Another app likens fetal development to the temptations on Parisian bakery shelves. A macaron, for instance.) Visual creepiness aside, Hess has unsettling thoughts about surrendering intimate information about her body to unknown recipients. She discovers that a popular app she regularly consults was developed by two brothers in Belarus backed by venture capitalists. Its surveillance exposed her to endless marketing schemes that hardly considered anyone’s well-being or financial resources. Curious about the history of fertility tracking before and after apps, Hess discovers a throughline of troubling eugenic ideologies. It travels through the advice of a popular pregnancy influencer. 

Deep into Hess’s first pregnancy, a “concerning” routine ultrasound detected what could be Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome (BWS), a rare genetic condition. Its possibility sent Hess anxiously scanning the internet, against her doctor’s advice, for medical information and possible maternal causes. Was it the wine? The Ativan? A fever? Her age? Unspecified guilt followed. But neither the internet, genetic testing, nor her doctor could reassure her about a cause or the possible extent of the condition. The internet images she sought of children with the full range of BWS anomalies hardly quelled her anxieties. Only after her son’s birth was a form of BWS confirmed.  

Hess sympathizes with the wish to deliver a healthy baby and the temptation to seek any available service or technology to that end. After all, that’s what she wanted. However, the prospect of birthing a child with an anomalous body leads her to question the meaning of the ubiquitous parental qualification: “As long as the baby is healthy.” Healthy, she finds, translates to normal. Anticipating a not-normal child makes her feel protective of her son even before his birth. After it, she deflects thoughtless remarks from strangers about his enlarged tongue protruding from his lips. (Corrective surgery later enables less compromised breathing and speech.) She and her husband care for and about him for the distinct person he is. About her initial anxieties about his body, Hess writes, “My nightmare . . . ended when I met my son.”  

Hess’s standout chapter “Growth” recounts her evolving response to her son’s imperfections and her efforts to manage others’ IRL and internet responses to him—a task she finds essential to parenting him. I hope this chapter is widely read, certainly by future parents, but also by clinicians, genetic counselors, and those who teach them.  

Some accounts of caring for an imperfect child cast the child and the parental relationship as special. Some view chronic illness or disability as a familial burden. Hess does neither. Instead, she folds caring for her son into the course of her life and her family’s. In that way, she continues a contribution of Michael Berube’s complicated 1996 Life as We Know It, however, adding a millennial’s navigations of current medical technologies and media static. Hess further envisions a world that participates in the care of all children, one that refuses to blame or isolate families with less-than-perfect children. That world would reduce parental anxieties more than screening for concerning “problems.” Philosopher of care and mother of a profoundly disabled child, Eva Kittay, would agree. 

Some readers might say that Amanda Hess’s financial and other resources make her generous perspective possible. She agrees. She’s half of a two-parent family. As journalists, she and her husband have more flexible schedules than countless other parents. But in the world Hess encourages, parental status would be irrelevant to their child’s care. 

Without being prescriptive, Hess’s lively, self-reflective story provokes readers to think twice about rejecting imperfect children—anyone’s—and to notice the eugenic logic underwriting rejection. Her book tests the claim that ever-evolving technologies enhance maternal well-being, empower parental choice, and guarantee healthy babies. (Ironically, a researcher Hess encountered reported on increasing evidence of BWS in IVF conceptions, many intended to screen for anomalies.) In fact, far more children are permanently harmed during their lives than are born ill or disabled. Rather than relying on the billion-dollar industry of prenatal testing, aren’t we better off, Hess asks, accepting and taking better care of all children however they’re born? 

Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age
Amanda Hess  
Doubleday, 2025, 272 pages 

]]> https://medhum.org/review/book-review/carol_schilling/second-life-by-amanda-hess/feed/ 0 How Real is the Pitt?  https://medhum.org/review/film-review/dave_hsu/how-real-is-the-pitt/ https://medhum.org/review/film-review/dave_hsu/how-real-is-the-pitt/#respond Mon, 05 May 2025 17:20:08 +0000 https://medhum.org/?p=10190 From Apollo on Call–a Medhum Podcast

On the latest episode of Apollo On Call, I am pleased to welcome my good friend and pop culture expert Dr. Stuart Harman, a paediatric emergency room physician from Ottawa, Canada, to discuss the breakout TV medical drama of the moment: The PITT. 

Both Stu and I have watched about three quarters of the show’s 15 episode first season at the time of recording this podcast, enough that we are ready to weigh in on some important medical humanities questions. Is The PITT realistic? Does it reflect the reality of life as an emergency room physician? Which parts of the show make sense and which don’t? What does it say about the hierarchal world of a teaching hospital? 

If you haven’t watched The PITT yet or are considering whether you should watch it, this is the episode for you. We deliberately avoid any spoilers and instead talk big picture about the show’s themes and place in medical humanities. 

Have a listen, and then come back in a month or two, when Stu and I catch up after we’ve finished the season. Next time, spoilers will be on so you better come prepared! 

David Hsu 

TRANSCRIPT FROM THIS EPISODE

The Pitt Part 1 

DH 00:00 

You know, when I went through med school, I had this whole imposter syndrome thing, and it took me, like, 17 years as a professional to get over it. Now it’s back. I’m watching these clerks outperform me, and I feel like I don’t belong as a doctor again. 

DH 00:18 

Welcome to Apollo On Call, the podcast of MedHum.org 

DH 00:22 

I’m your host, Dr. David Hsu. Hope you enjoy the show. 

DH 00:30 

All right. Welcome back to Apollo On Call. And if I sound really excited, it is because I am excited to talk to my buddy today about The Pitt, all right, and so first I’ve got to introduce my co-host for this episode. It’s Dr. Stuart Harman. He’s a pediatric emergency room physician and the director of the pediatrics residency training program at the University of Ottawa. More importantly, he co-hosts the Medical Dads podcast with me, so people who want to check out a discussion about parenting can head over there. And why is he appearing on Apollo On Call and why is he here with MedHum is because all those things I said about Dr. Harman are true and accurate, but most importantly, he is an expert on comic books, cartoons, sitcoms. So really, he is the guru of pop culture, and that’s what we’re going to do. He’s going to be a recurring person on MedHum whenever we have something about pop culture that we need to discuss. So, Dr. Harman, welcome to the show.  

SH 01:34 

Thank you for having me on the show. That description you gave is exactly how they introduced me the last time I presented at the Canadian Paediatric Society. 

DH 01:42 

Excellent, excellent. All right, and so that’s why here today. We’re going to talk about The Pitt, which is the show that everyone in medicine seems to be talking about lately, but it’s also appearing everywhere, like, it’s been in the news. This is a big thing, and for people who haven’t heard about it, The Pitt is a medical TV drama. It is airing on HBO Max, which in Canada is available on Crave. And it’s sort of maybe kind of a sequel to ER, but not officially. So all of these things combined to make it something that everyone in medicine is talking about it. So at Apollo On Call and MedHum, we need to talk about it, right? Because this is a medical humanity site. We’re trying to talk about the intersection of medicine, literature, the arts and, quite frankly, TV doesn’t get enough attention as a version of the arts, right? It’s generally considered a little bit too low brow, probably for academic medical humanities discussion, but we’re gonna change that today, because we need to talk about this. We need to bring medical humanities to the masses.  

SH 02:50 

You know, I was worried when you asked me to come on to this podcast, that I wouldn’t be able to handle the increased level of sophistication that I expect on this compared to when we’re doing our Medical Dads podcast talking about just our lives but now I realize we’re talking about television. Okay, I’m up to speed. 

DH 03:06 

Exactly, exactly. We invited you here for a reason, so let me just tell for people who don’t know what The Pitt is, The Pitt is a 15-hour television series. It’s the first season of this series that has just recently aired on HBO Max, so there’s one episode per week, and it’s a little bit different than what most fancy TV dramas are in this day and age. First of all, the length of the show is very long. There’s 15 hours. Most shows kind of cap it at seven or 13 hours, so it’s a little bit longer than most shows. So I had to ask Dr. Harman, are you in? You gotta watch The Pitt with me, okay? 15 hours. We gotta commit this amount of time to it, which is a little bit hard, we haven’t even started the show. We don’t know if we’re gonna like it. 15 hours seems like it could be a big ask, but we are getting there. 

SH 03:54 

There’s so many other aspects of our lives that if we just committed to doing 15 hours of we’d be such better people. 

DH 04:01 

Not necessarily, okay, because this podcast is gonna be really good. It’s hard to imagine that something would make us better than the 15 hours we spent watching this show.  

SH 04:10 

That’s right, you heard it here first, that watching this show is better than 15 hours of volunteer work. We’ve done more for the world than we could have with 15 hours of cleaning the environment.  

DH 04:20 

Hey, this is volunteer work, man, last I checked you were not getting paid for it, I’m not getting paid for it. We are doing medical humanities for the love of medical humanities and TV. 

SH 04:30 

Excellent observation.  

DH 04:31 

We’re gonna do at least two episodes talking about The Pitt, right? So today, the first episode, we’re gonna give a bit of background about the show. We’re going to talk around the show, but we’re not going to talk too much about the actual content of the specific plot developments. So in regular terms, this means there’s going to be no spoilers today, because so far, neither Dr. Harman nor I have finished the entire season. We’ve only watched part of it.  

SH 05:03 

That’s right.  

DH 05:03 

I’m about three-quarters of the way through. I think you’re about two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through, yeah, so we don’t know how it ends.  

SH 05:10 

Yeah, right.  

DH 05:11 

And so we’re approaching this as we’re gonna talk to you guys and gals out there who have not watched the show yet, and we’ll give you an opinion on how we feel about the show as medical doctors, and how we feel about it from a medical humanities point of view. And if you do end up taking us up on the offer and watching the rest of the show, you can come back in a little while, when we’ve had our follow-up discussion where we break down the thing in more detail, all right, with spoilers. 

SH 05:36 

That’s right, we’ll spoil the heck out of it.  

DH 05:38 

Okay, so now I have to tell you to start this conversation how I got into this thing called The Pitt, because actually, people who listen to me or talk to me know that I don’t watch a ton of TV anymore, right? And so I was happy, 

SH 05:53 

I will say that that’s not necessarily generally known.  

DH 05:57 

Okay, I don’t watch a ton of TV, right? I don’t have an active television show that I’m super into. I’m not a person who knows what’s coming up next, you know, for the new season on TV. But a few months ago, my sister was like, have you heard of The Pitt? I’m like, Yeah, whatever, The Pitt what is that? And she doesn’t ask me these type of questions very often, so I clicked on the link she sent me. I’m like, What? It sort of felt like a reboot of ER which instantly made my whole body go soft, right? Like, I didn’t know what to do. 

SH 06:31 

Yeah, so obviously, was the great density that parts of your body work, because it sounds like you’re really excited about this. 

DH 06:37 

Yeah, no, like you’re weak-kneed, right? Like you’re about to faint, right? So the reason for this is because the original show, ER, was this seminal thing that happened to me in high school, that television show probably led to me becoming a doctor more than any other thing in the world. And I hate to admit it, because sometimes my mom, people will be like, Oh, why did he end up getting into medicine? And she’ll say to her friends, well, there used to be this TV show called ER, that he was really into, and it just sounds like the hokiest thing ever and I really hate it when she prefaces this story by telling people about how I used to stay up on Thursday nights to watch ER, but it actually is kind of true, right? So what actually happened was, if you remember, in the early 90s, there was this crazy, big movie about dinosaurs on an island that were genetically re-modified, called Jurassic Park. So that movie came out, and I was super hyped, loved it, and it was based on a novel written by Michael Crichton. So then I got really into Michael Crichton, and I realized, Oh, he’s a medical doctor, and there’s a new show coming out on NBC. Because Jurassic Park was so popular, they took some of his other stuff and said, Okay, let’s finally put this on the air. So he had an old script for a medical movie called ER. They spun it into the pilot episode of what turned out to be a really, really successful television series. So I was there right at the beginning, the first episode of ER came on Thursday night. I think it might have been 1993 or 1994 and I was there watching it, and within 20 minutes, 40 minutes, I was hooked, right? And so I was a huge ER fan. And this was not a show that a lot of my friends were watching in 10th grade. A few of us watched it so, so I was really into this show. I watched it consistently for five or six years through university. I remember freshman year at Cornell University, Thursday night, 10pm. This was back in the day when people didn’t have streaming. There wasn’t anything on your computer that you could watch. You had to go down in the dorm, in the res to the TV lounge, right? And there’d be these two TVs mounted up high, two TVs for the entire dorm.  

SH 08:46 

Wow.  

DH 08:47 

And Thursday night, felt like the room was packed, right? I would go down sometimes to watch football or basketball, and there’d be nobody there. But Thursday night, 10pm tons of people were there. Everyone was watching ER, I did that a few times. Loved the show. Gradually, the show kind of petered out for me because the original cast started leaving. So if people who follow TV, they know George Clooney got his big break on ER, he went from being just another face on TV to, you know, megastar.  

SH 09:20 

You’re forgetting his seminal role on the TV series, The Facts of Life?  

DH 09:24 

It wasn’t The Facts of Life, he was on Roseanne. So you even forgot it yourself. 

SH 09:29 

Before Roseanne, before the later seasons, The Facts of Life, George Clooney. 

DH 09:34 

Really?  

SH 09:35 

Yeah, this is after the girls left the boarding school and they owned a restaurant with Mrs. Edna. See, that’s why you got me here on the show. That’s what I’m here for.  

DH 09:47 

I did not know he was there. Okay, so there, I stand corrected. But either way, he ends up leapfrogging into Hollywood. And then most of the original cast eventually, they move on to other things, and the show becomes a bit too soapy, too sensationalized, and I gradually lost interest in it. I did discover, though, as I went through my medical training, I went through medical school, I went into residency. At some point in residency, I realized, Hey, these guys are still watching, ER. My residency buddies, some of them, would meet up on Thursday night at 10pm to watch, ER, I’m like, What? You guys are still watching that show that I used to watch back in high school, it’s not even good anymore, right? But at that point, I think there was this draw that if you’re a medical trainee, that a lot of the things that are happening on the show are very realistic, so that so these doctors in training would stand, would sit there, trying to figure out what’s the next thing you would do in this case, which test would you order? There was this whole procedural aspect to the show which I was oblivious to.  

SH 10:43 

Yeah, you know, for our generation, we, you and I ,are probably at the edge of that age group of physicians who were inspired to go into medicine largely because of ER, I feel like people who are just a little bit older than us, who would have been the right age when that show was newer, and really just taking off a lot of people in that cohort, I remember coming from med school interviews, and some of the upper-year students meeting me and saying to me, Okay, yeah, so there’s pretty much two groups of people here, those who are really into ER and those who don’t really watch it. So which group are you in?  

DH 11:17 

Wow, yeah. So the crazy thing is, it’s been many years, and now I’m teaching med students. I’m teaching residents. Sometimes they’ll be like, Well, why did you get into medicine? I’ll be like, Well, there used to be this show called ER, and then they’ll kind of look at me blankly, and I’ll realize, I guess they weren’t even born when ER started, which just makes me feel so old. And then I’ll mention something like, you know who George Clooney is, right? And they’ll be like, they’ll look at me blankly, like they don’t know who George Clooney is, which I just find unbelievable. To me, he’s, like, one of the five biggest male movie stars in the world. But maybe I’m just really old now, right? So nothing dates a thing more than their understanding. Nothing dates a person more than their understanding of pop culture, because pop culture just rebirths itself so quickly that what’s hot today is gone tomorrow, but it is really nice that suddenly, in 2024, I caught wind that this sort of remake of the show has come on. It’s not really a remake because, because there’s this whole legal thing happening, right? So I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but basically, apparently, they were supposed to make a sequel to ER, but the talks between Michael Crichton’s wife, because Michael Crichton has since passed away, his wife, who manages his estate, and the producers of the original ER, including the actor, Noah Wyle, who’s the star of the show, talks broke down, so they went off and made this new show called The Pitt, and she found that the show was a little bit too similar to ER, so there’s this whole controversy, and she’s suing them for making a clone of ER, but they’re saying, Well, this show is actually quite different, and it is a little bit different, right, other than the fact that the main character is the same actor from ER, but he’s playing a different person, and it is set in an emergency room, and the pacing is kind of similar. The other big difference is the show set in a different city, and the show is set over 15 consecutive hours. So each episode of the show is intended to be one hour of real-time drama, right? So we’re gonna go through a 15-hour shift. And so all of that’s set up a little bit like the old action show 24 right, where every episode was one hour of a season. So it has enough differences for me, and that’s where we land on the show. 

SH 13:35 

Huh, I did not know at all about this. It seems hard to sue for somebody making a medical drama, it seems like there are many, many of those out there that are similar to each other, or just even in general, right? All kinds of genres. Can somebody sue somebody else for making a Western show? Can the makers of Bonanza come and sue you if you  

DH 13:56 

Exactly, well, the jury is still out. We’ll see where that actually goes, but that has been brewing in kind of the background as people talk about the show. But anyways, that’s just the background. Let’s talk a little bit around what we think about the show now that we’re kind of two thirds of the way through.  

SH 14:11 

Yeah, absolutely. And for the makers of that show, please don’t have any characters have sex in a closet, or the makers of Grey’s Anatomy may also come after you, and you’ll have two bosses on your hand.  

DH 14:21 

All right. The thing that everyone wants to know, because you and I are doctors, I’m not an emergency room doctor, you’re not an adult emergency room doctor, but the thing that everyone wants to know is, is this show realistic or not? So as the pediatric emergency room doctor, you’re the closest to that that we can, closest person that can answer this question, yeah, what do you think? Is it realistic? 

SH 14:44 

Overall no, well, actually, that’s not fair for me to say. I hate giving an answer that’s sort of an in between answer, right? But the cases that are happening in the show, you could tell are very much based off of somebody’s stories. That someone like me has a wacky case that came in, and I told that story to somebody who made it into a show. When you’re watching the cases, it’s very much like that. Especially for me as a pediatrician, I mostly pay attention when the when the pediatric cases come in, and some of those cases, like, as soon as the patient comes in, I’m thinking to myself, Okay, what’s a wacky story that I could think of, that maybe I didn’t have, but that circulates amongst pediatricians. What’s a wacky story that I can think of, and just based on that alone, it’s, oh, yeah, it’s going to be this, not necessarily because that’s the only possible medical explanation, but because that’s the only possible medical explanation that makes one of my really cool stories. So in that sense, the stories do feel like they are real. 

DH 15:52 

Okay, give me one example. I mean, we’re not gonna spoil the show, but give me one example of a case that walked in the door on the show that you’re kind of like, Okay, that’s a wacky thing that happened.  

SH 16:02 

Okay, I won’t reveal the diagnosis, but there’s a point at which they bring in a five-month-old who’s irritable, and it struck me right away that, wow, they’re bringing this child straight to resuscitation, and they start having characters rhyming off all the craziest, worst case scenario, things that this could be and really having this elevated level of panic.  

DH 16:26 

Oh, right. I called that one. I knew what that case was because of that. And I had never actually seen that specific thing in real life, but I had heard other doctors talking about it at a study meeting. They’re like, Oh, we saw this really cool thing, and they taught us about it, and none of us have ever seen it, yeah. But I was like, It has to be this.  

SH 16:47 

I’ve seen this diagnosis several times, but I’ve never actually seen it present as we thought it was this super serious thing, and we were going down that pathway, and then we realized it was this. For me, when I’ve seen it in real life, it’s more like, Yeah, the parents kind of figured out this thing was wrong and brought in, and we knew what it we knew what it was. But when we tell this story to medical students, when we tell medical students, Okay, you got to look out for this diagnosis, because somebody might think it’s this super serious thing, and then it turns out to be this. We tell students this story of how this could happen, but for the show, it happens the one in 100 ways that it could happen, not the way that it actually. 

DH 17:26 

I think we have to spoil this particular … 

SH 17:29 

No, don’t spoil it, we just promised people. 

DH 17:31 

But it’s not that important.  

SH 17:33 

Oh, that’s what people who give spoilers always say. 

DH 17:36 

Oh, come on. But it’s really weird to be talking to our audience like, Well, this thing happened, and then this and then this, and then but they have no idea what we’re talking about.  

SH 17:42 

They won’t until they watch the show.  

DH 17:43 

All right, fine.  

SH 17:45 

The point is there are a lot of these stories, a lot of these things that happen on the show where you can tell it’s based on somebody’s extreme case, or someone’s really interesting story with a wacky ending. It’s just not that realistic that all those things are happening simultaneously in an hour. 

DH 18:04 

Yeah, right. So I’ve been watching the show with my wife, which is an interesting experience, because she trained as an internist, and now she’s a GI specialist. So she’s actually seen a lot of these things in real life. So as we’re going through the show, I’m like, This isn’t realistic for some reason, and usually my complaint is this is not realistic because of the pace, the pace of this is insane. And she’s like, No, these cases are real. Like that case, I’ve seen that, I’ve seen that. And I know she’s seen it because she can almost predict what the next action is going to be with remarkable clarity, right? So, I will say, I married a real doctor, right? But I do feel like, in terms of reality-wise, the actual individual cases are all based in reality. They’re not making this stuff up at all. Individual-case-wise. 

SH 18:51 

Yeah, at least as far as the medicine goes, there’s a few things where I’m kind of wondering, did they actually make up? There are a few things where I’m wondering is, did this actually happen, or did they just add some drama to it, in terms of just things that happen with characters that are not really medical, but that are, you could sort of see happening. So some of those stories like that, but yeah, you know, to be fair to the people who are making the show, to that question, is this show realistic? I have to say there’s a high degree of realism on this show that it would be an insult to the efforts that have been put in the show for me to just flippantly say, no, it’s not realistic. The medicine is very realistic, and when I compare it to other medical things I’ve seen on TV, it’s extremely realistic, right? On other shows I’ve seen somebody’s looking at a CT scan and saying, Oh yes, you’ve got three concussions, and I’m yelling at the screaming like, You can’t diagnose a concussion from a CT scan. This show has none of that. And in fact, this show sometimes has characters address things that, like, parents will be asking for something that they’ve seen on TV, and the characters are explaining, no, in real life, that’s not how this works. This is how it goes. So the show does have a high degree of realism. I got to give it some serious credit for that. Also pretty impressed by some of the makeup and stuff that they have. Some of it to me, like, there’s an injury, a gruesome leg injury, right? The beginning that my wife in the first episode was like, All right, you’re watching this on your own. But I’m saying like, Oh no, don’t worry, this is not what it looks like in real life, that doesn’t look real, right? But then there’s some other things where they’re cutting flesh or doing a procedure that I’m saying, Yeah that’s better than any of the mannequins I have at the hospital for simulating something. 

DH 20:32 

Right, it does look very realistic to me overall. So it induces this level of cringiness that even I, as a seasoned TV action movie watcher, I have trouble watching every moment of this show. I have to kind of stare at a spot just to the side of my TV at times, which is really weird, right? And then, and of course, then my wife’s making fun of me. She can tell that I’m kind of cringing, but later in the season, she gets her comeuppance. There’s a part where she can’t handle watching it either. 

DH 21:05 

Now, I have a question. So my comment, though, is just that the sheer volume of stuff is not realistic, right? Like, it was just too much of this happening. I’m like, How many of these things can happen within one hour, right? I know it, there’s different characters involved, but this is nuts. If anyone had this job where this amount of volume was happening in any given hour, even once a month, they’re gonna have a nervous breakdown, right? So the volume of the thing is where I think it’s a bit unrealistic.  

SH 21:36 

I would say that if they told me, we’re just making one season. That’s it. There’s just one season. Because the premise of this season is that it’s just one super statistically anomalous day where all these craziest things all happened, of all these stories all happened on the same day, and sometimes all happening in the same hour. Then I would say, All right, I can give that a bit of artistic license that, 

DH 22:01 

Wow, really? So it’s believable, almost believable, then. 

SH 22:05 

Yeah, the part that’s not realistic in terms of volume, is the speed at which a character will come in the room and say, Okay, yeah, you need this test. And then they’ll cut to another character, and then they’ll come back, and the person is back with those test results already done, and you’re saying, No, that just that’s not even a matter of hospital efficiency. It’s not physically possible to wheel the bed down there that fast, inject the dye, do the image, get the image read, and come back to the room. It’s just not that possible.  

DH 22:31 

Well, that might be the Canadian socialist healthcare system that you’re used to at work, but this is America, baby. Anything can happen.  

SH 22:38 

Just a little bit of that but it’s quite possible. It’s funny because they that part of the premise of the show is that it’s a hospital that feels under-resourced, right? And I’m often watching that being so jealous of what they have available in that hospital. 

DH 22:51 

All right, now, you have been, you’re a seasoned emergency room doctor, but it’s a pediatric ER. You’re working in Canada, and we know in Canada there’s no money for anything. One question I have, because this seems unrealistic to me. There’s a recurrent storyline in the show where the hospital admin like the Ms. money bags, the lady with the money bags, comes down to the emerg and asks the staff to like you guys, got to get your patient satisfaction ratings up, right? But she doesn’t just come down once throughout this season, she appears several times. And it’s not a season, it’s one shift. It’s like she has nothing better to do than every two hours, she’s gonna come downstairs and just bust somebody’s balls about wasting money and poor scores, and then the ER doc has to take a stand in front of everyone, say, Listen, we need more money. We need more beds. Is this an actual interaction that happens in the hospital? Because I know, as an entrepreneur, I manage a medical clinic, sometimes my employees come down and, you know, they’d huddle up, and then they come to us like, Yo, we need a raise, right? But that doesn’t happen four times a day, all right? It happens once in a while, and then we’ll go home and think about it. This is happening recurrently. How realistic is that?  

SH 24:03 

You know what I would say, thinking a lot about this, because doctors I know who’ve watched the show, who aren’t even in adult emergency medicine, where, admittedly, that pace that they’re on that show is much more realistic for adult medicine than is for pediatrics, right? Because we just don’t have that many heart attacks and traumas and stuff like that in a day. But people I’ve talked to are watching some of this stuff about hospital admin being focused on these, on these things like patient satisfaction scores instead of actual patient health. That a lot of people are saying, Oh, that’s so real. That feels just like my experience. And what I would say is watching the show that is what it feels like. What’s happening on the show is what it feels like for a lot of physicians. And I’m not saying that it isn’t what it is like for some physicians, but if I’m just looking at my own hospital, that is what it feels like. But when I’m watching it, I’m saying that’s not what it actually is like. What struck me as really odd in just the very first episode is the directness in which somebody in one of these more like, higher positions comes down and, frankly tells somebody you have to do this for the money in the politics. Whereas in real life, you get much more of that people, and I’m not just not criticizing my hospital admin, I just mean like everybody who’s at that higher level, like beyond hospital, even government, all the way top, you get a lot of more of a No, no, on the face of it, we are sympathetic to you. We understand it’s difficult. You get all these things. But then the frustration is that you feel like, Yeah, but from what’s actually happening, it tells me that, no, you’re not actually. 

DH 25:38 

Right.  

SH 25:40 

And this conveniently puts everything into one easily personified villain who’s coming down and saying that. Whereas my hospital admin, if I think of like my hospital CEO, of which we have a new hospital CEO, she’s right in there with me in a lot of ways, you know, she also is mortified by the reality of the system and the problems we’re having with funding and those type of things. She is not sort of evilly cackling saying, Haha, it’s all about whether or not I could, you know, make the books look balanced while the doctors patients get scared. It’s not that. That’s not what it’s like in real life. But I think for a lot of people watching it, this is what they feel like. This is what they feel like the admin is doing to them.  

DH 26:23 

I think that’s a really good point about the show. And when we asked this question about realism, is that the show is realistic in terms of the medicine, maybe the pacing is unrealistic, but the overall feeling is this is exactly what you just said. The overall feeling is how it feels like to be a doctor, and probably how it feels like to be a patient. You know, in the emergency room, I feel like they capture that feeling thing so well on this show that the rest of it, you know, sometimes, yeah, there’s artistic license, and there are things that and that that’s not exactly how it’s done in in terms of the medicine – doesn’t matter, because they hit the tone and the feeling. So right on this show, yeah, that I will stand on a ledge about. 

SH 27:05 

Yeah, I’ve got colleagues who told me that they watched the show and start to cry. I’ve got colleagues who watched the show and said they couldn’t get past the first 15 minutes because it just felt too much like their day at work. And not that I want to ruin the magic or anything like this. But it’s not that for viewers who are watching that show, they should feel like, Oh my gosh, that’s what Dr. Harman is going through every day. No, I’m not going through that. I’m not at the ledge of the hospital contemplating jumping off the beginning of the shift. But, yeah, there’s a lot of sentiments in there that really is not exaggeration to say that we’ve got patients in the wait room longer than actually what they quoted the wait times being on that show, right? They’re talking about patients being in there for six hours. And I’m like, Oh, I got patients waiting way longer than that. And the degree to which that’s a problem and a danger to people is kind of bang on.  

DH 27:58 

Okay, let’s talk a little bit about the characters. One thing that I noticed as the show started, was that the characters seemed kind of like caricatures, right? So a person walks in, you know, this is the doctor. Oh, that’s the grizzled old Obi-Wan Kenobi, right? He’s been through a lot, he’s very kind, but there’s some things that kind of are unsettling about his past. Or, here’s the supergenius, right? Everyone has, like a supergenius got into med school super early, but a little young, right? Or, here’s the here’s the B, I, T, C, H, resident, right? No one mess with her, right? So everyone kind of, at the beginning at least, fits these caricatures and when you’re talking about TV and books, those type of caricatures, generally, we try to avoid them because they just seem so one-dimensional, right? It’s almost like reading a comic book.  

SH 28:56 

You didn’t tell me when I came on the show we’d be dissing comic books. 

DH 29:00 

Well, I’m just saying it’s like reading a comic. Whether it’s good or bad, it’s up to you. But what I will say is that I thought that the caricatures really work in a way, because in real life, when we’re working in a busy hospital, and you and I went to med school together, when we meet people in our class, all of us, as human beings, unfortunately, we just automatically pigeon hole people as caricatures until we get to know them, right? Like, Oh, that’s the pretty girl, right? That’s the annoying guy. Like, we all do this kind of thing, until we get to know them. I feel like this show did a really good job of starting us off that way, because that’s when you’re working in a hospital and you’re rotating through a different rotation every two weeks, and you have to instantly get along with your supervisor and instantly get along with your team. You got to figure out the lay of the land super fast. And the only way to do that, I feel, is to sort of identify people as certain things and then figure out how to get to get on their good side right away. So I feel like this show actually shows us that. On another show, the caricatures would be kind of that’s one-dimensional. These aren’t real people. But I think in this show, it actually works really well, because, again, that’s what being a resident or a medical trainee is actually like.  

SH 30:12 

Well, I’d certainly agree that the show starts off with a lot of people who are the characters we have in our mind, of people that we work with. But then as the show progresses, they start to reveal a little bit more layers to the character, more depths to the character.  

DH 30:27 

Right. 

SH 30:28 

But even when I was watching, by the time I’m on episode four, which is only four hours into the shift, and I’m seeing some characters who don’t get each other, starting to see each other eye to eye open up. I’m thinking that it does not happen in four hours. On top everything else going in the hospital, you somehow had time for this, Nah, that’s not realistic.  

DH 30:46 

Right, the pacing is weird. Everyone was like, How are you gonna do a season of television over 15 hours straight in real time? Because how much character development can you really have? So they do have to squish everything into this condensed version, but it still feels true, even though there is this thing where you can’t suspend your disbelief that much.  

SH 31:09 

Yeah, I think one could make the criticism. This is stupid, like these episodes, even when you watch them in a lot of ways, the episodes feel like different days, almost like some of the episodes you think they should have just made this a series. And then this happens this day, and this happens that day. But I gotta say that there was some utility in this gimmick of having it go hour by hour. It does give you a little bit more of that sort of feeling of how things change over the course of a day, how the energy level, the attitude, the tolerance of characters, what’s going on around them shifts over the course of the day. And that, even that you start to feel a little bit along with the character of like, Okay, yeah, they just can’t wait for you to get through this day.  

DH 31:54 

Yeah, there’s a moment late, at least it’s relatively late, in the shift where, where one of the characters finally says, Today has just been crazy. And I’m like, finally someone said it, right, because that was my feeling the whole way through like this. This must be the nuttiest day in the history of medicine, yeah.  

SH 32:12 

But actually, if that was the premise of the show, is that they’re calling the show the craziest day ever that you can sort of be like, All right, I can believe that. But if you’re trying to sell me on the idea that they’re going to come back tomorrow and have the same day tomorrow, it’s like, Come on, in fact, they’ll run out of stories.  

DH 32:28 

Well, that’s my problem, is that, I mean, I’m pretty sure this show is going to be green lit for season two, so that means a year from now, there’s going to be another nutty day in the ER, like, how can they top this, right? But okay, we’ll deal with that when they actually get to season two. 

SH 32:43 

In a way I would, I would really kind of hope that they don’t, that it’s just that this stands alone, and it feels much more like a piece of art if it does standalone as like, this is just a slice of the life. This is just this crazy day. These are the characters. Here’s what happened. Inevitably, if they started to make this go on for first like Season 2, 3, 4, 5. First of all, you’re going to run out of these classic medical stories, because already they’ve used up some of the best. If they went to some peds emergency doctors, and we’re like, Okay, what are some of the stories that we could put on the show, that you got them right there, you’re going to be running out of good ones, I feel like.  

DH 33:18 

Hmm I don’t know. I feel like medicine has a well of stories. I mean, medical humanities has a well of stuff to talk about, there could be way more. But you are right, they hit on a lot of the big ones, right, end-of-life care, abuse, when you uncover abuse, what is the role of children’s aid and things like that. They talk about these things on the show, so they do hit on a lot of them, but honestly, in the world of medicine and medical humanities, you can come back to these stories from different angles there. This never ends, right? You’re an emergency room doctor, man, it never gets boring that way.  

SH 33:51 

Yeah, well you know what, that’s fair to say. I guess I was thinking of this more analogous to something like The Avengers, right? You make The Avengers movie, and you use your best superheroes up front, right? Those were the best superheroes Marvel had, in many ways, and Marvel has tons of more superheroes that you can give a show to. But you’re wondering, how come the Moon Knight show isn’t taken away, taken off the way Captain America does. It’s like, yeah, you use your best ones up front. But you’re right, there is a never ending well stories to tell, I suppose. But I mean, even the beloved ER eventually got to the point where a doctor’s arms are getting cut off by helicopters, like, come on. 

DH 34:31 

I mean, every TV show suffers from this. So everything needs to have a finite lifespan. Shows need to figure out a way to end at the right moment, right, and actually Wayne Gretzky, the great Canadian hockey player, he said it best: you always want to go out while your fans think you still have one more year to give. That’s when you need to go out.  

SH 34:52 

Yeah, right.  

DH 34:53 

That’s the perfect moment. When he was about to retire, he was playing for the New York Rangers. He always tells the story. I’ve heard it a few times that his dad was telling him, Wayne, just play another season. He’s like, Dad, I scored, like, 10 goals this year. I used to score that in a good week, I’m not that good anymore. But the fans still thought he could play, and even his dad thought he could still play. That’s the perfect time to go out. Means your level hasn’t really dipped yet, and you’re getting out ahead of the curve. But anyway, that’s just an aside. All right, now, you mentioned something before we started recording that I thought was an interesting point that we should touch on. Was you felt like, in terms of realism, some of the stuff that’s going on, in terms of the hierarchy of the medical training structure was a little bit off, and I think this is worth talking about because I don’t think too many people are talking about this.  

SH 35:40 

Yeah, I think it fits with the general public’s perception of what it’s like to be a medical trainee. And probably that’s partly informed by some of these older shows, and older doctor shows that the medical student can get dumped on, that the resident can get dumped on, that the staff person can speak so harshly to the medical student or that the resident could give another resident a mean nickname or something like that, right off the bat, and that struck me as odd in the first couple of episodes. And this is from the point of view, I guess, that I’m a program director for residents, and 

DH 36:20 

Right. You deal with this every day, right? As soon as someone gives someone a nickname, that issue is bouncing back up the chain of command to Dr. Harman to deal with.  

SH 36:29 

Certainly, some of the way that the more senior characters interact with more the junior characters, it just would be a complete non-starter, no-go and I don’t just necessarily mean that we have rules, because I don’t want people to get the impression that no abuse could possibly happen in a hospital, or that, you know, that if it happened in my hospital, I’d say, Oh, that’s impossible, nothing like that can happen here. But just even the idea that the students would just take it and accept it the way they do on the show seems really out of touch. You would have students quickly pushing back. And maybe this is different, because it’s American and not Canadian, right? And I don’t know what the union is like for medical trainees in the US compared to Canada, but staff would not be able to get away with a lot of the stuff that they’re saying to these to these characters.  

DH 37:20 

Hmm okay, fair. I thought I didn’t really register that. But because I feel like in medicine, there are a fair amount of people grating on each other, getting on each other’s nerves. But now that you spell it out that way, yeah, some of the characters are way over the line at different points, and they never really get called out on it in a real-world kind of way.  

SH 37:41 

Yeah, you know, that’s without giving anything away. There’s like a character who gives another character a nickname and is using it, and the character tells them to stop, and they don’t stop. That would be a problem that maybe it’s they’re too busy and after maybe season two is just 15 hours in real time of the program director having to deal with all these complaints that start arising from the residents who have been treated poorly by other residents and staff. But the other thing that I was going to ask you about: because we’re Canadian doctors, do you have trouble figuring out whose rank is what in that show sometimes? 

DH 38:17 

A little bit. I thought it was kind of odd that, in terms of the rankings, it took me a while to figure out that Noah Wyle is the only attending doctor on the ship. Which, I thought this was kind of crazy. I’m like, so you got one Obi-Wan Kenobi, and everyone below him is a trainee, right. And it’s like this crazy busy hospital, which to the characters, it feels like this is just another one of their days that they would man a hospital with just one experienced person and everyone else as a trainee. I then thought back to the times I’ve done emergency room shifts back as a trainee, and I was like, even those little community ERs had at least two staff or sometimes three at the same time. So, Dr. Harman, is it possible that one guy would be in charge of so many different things at the same time?  

SH 39:02 

Not in any hospital that I’ve ever seen in Canada, I mean during the daytime. If it was overnight, that would make some sense. You know, my hospital, there are periods of the night where there’s just one doctor. But this guy comes in at seven o’clock in the morning, takes over, and that’s it. It’s just him, and he just seems to like go. He seems to go from room to room, overseeing things, and then occasionally, will also seem to have time to spend a significant amount of time talking to a patient himself. And nobody seems to have to do any charting. There’s one point where a character does comment to another character to if they don’t mind charting something, but you never see them doing it. 

DH 39:41 

Right. So, I will agree. It took me a few episodes to figure out, Oh, wait, this person is actually still a resident. Because for a while it’s like, maybe Collins is an attending, because she acts a little bit like an attending. I’m like, maybe there is another attending. My wife and I both thought that, until it was revealed she was just a later year resident. And then the clerks, like, the medical students. These are third or fourth-year med students. The closest I ever got to the show in terms of hierarchy was I was once a third and fourth year clerk in the ER. I couldn’t do 1% of the stuff that the third-year clerk is doing on this show, right? The stuff that those two clerks are doing blows my mind, right? I feel so inferior watching. You know, when I went through med school, I had this whole imposter syndrome thing, and it took me like 17 years as a professional to get over it. Now it’s back. I’m watching these clerks outperform me and I feel like I don’t belong as a doctor again.  

SH 40:36 

Well, you know, where some of my colleagues do say that they watch the show and they can’t take it. I am finding a little bit of inspiration from the way that the efficiency of the characters on the show, even though they’re talking about how their wait times are long, and this kind of stuff, when I can when I see how quickly they’re on top of things and the smoothness with which they do it. I mean, most of my life, I’ve lived by watching what’s happening on TV and then trying to live up to that ideal, right? Never mind what Bill Cosby does in real life, but Dr. Huxtable, I try to try to be what Dr. Huxtable is, even though it’s not realistic. This show makes me feel the same way. It’s like, I can be that doctor. I can try harder to be that doctor.  

DH 41:18 

All right, so if anyone is ever in the Ottawa region, and they have a children’s emergency and you walk in the emergency room and you see this grizzled, scruffy looking version of Dr. Harman, you will know that he has been inspired by Dr. Rock.  

SH 41:31 

It starts with growing the beard of the main character on the show.  

DH 41:34 

Well, that’s the easiest way to emulate your role models in real life. It’s just to wear what they wear.  

SH 41:40 

But I love the way characters, they know doses off the top of their head, even for obscure things, they’re ready to talk through procedures that they probably don’t do every day, and yeah, they just move quickly from thing to thing. I like that. 

DH 41:57 

Now, you mentioned that a lot of people in medicine are being affected by the show. I guess this is what you’re talking about. 

SH 42:03 

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I just say this because I only heard about the show when you told me about the show, when you said, Okay, I want you to start watching the show so we can talk about it. So then I started saying to people, Oh, have you heard about the show? And sometimes, once you become aware of something, you see it everywhere. Well, that’s what this was like. Once you told me about the show, suddenly I’m realizing all these people are talking about it, and the themes I’m getting are very similar. People I’m working with. I mentioned it before earlier, but someone saying that I was two episodes in and I got tears streaming down my face. And people are saying that about not just the cases, not just this all reminded me of a sad case, but those things, like the waiting room being super crowded and you not being able to do anything about it. You want to get something done, you can’t because you don’t have the resources. Or having a patient who you want something better for but the patient doesn’t buy into it, and you can’t get it for them. Those type of things, the person who represents that character, who represents the hospital or the government, or whatever she represents, who’s the person to tell you, I don’t care about people, I just care about the bottom line. That character, just people see that, and some of them just feel that, even though there’s no one in our hospital that I would point to say, Oh, that’s the person like that in my hospital, but just that sentiment that she represents, that this seems to tag people.  

DH 43:29 

I mean, I guess what we’re saying is that there’s this whole idea of art imitating life, right? So a medical drama, by definition, is like an art imitating real life hospital. But what actually seems to be happening is that life can imitate art imitating life, right? Like the real doctors are getting affected by this show that they’re watching, which is cool. And then I will say also, from a medical humanity standpoint, like most people in the world, do not actively think about medical humanities, right, even doctors are not actively thinking about, we go to work, we do our job, we go home. Yeah, sometimes you’ll read about in the newspaper, you know, someone will write an article about, you know, lack of medical resources, or gun control or abortion, right, and the medical implications of it. So sometimes people start thinking about how medicine and life are starting to interact. This show, through pop culture, is forcing its audience to consider each and every one of these issues that normally you might never think about, right? Which I think is a really good thing. This is exactly what medical humanities is. It’s making us think about, you know, Okay, so we keep talking about poverty and health care. Well, let’s put you into the ER and see what that’s actually like. Make you feel the feels about what happens when people can’t get access to care and bring out that feeling for people. I think this show really does something on the medical humanities level that we don’t get enough. 

SH 45:01 

Yeah, you know, in so many ways, this is very analogous to art, like a painting, right? You know, you take a painting like The Scream, picture where the guys hold this out of his face. So you could criticize that picture and say, Well, that doesn’t look realistic, you know, I don’t have pale, gray skin like the guy in that picture. And when I feel depressed, the background behind me isn’t a bunch of slurred up colors. You could look at this show and say, Oh, all that stuff doesn’t happen in an hour. But I guess it’s more when art works properly, it’s what it sort of represents, and the feeling that it evokes is real, right? And that’s kind of what the show is, there’s a sort of symbolism just in the idea that, Okay, this character just dealt with a patient who’s died, who couldn’t be resuscitated, and all the emotional toll that goes through dealing with it, with the parents. Meanwhile, on the other side of the divider, on that show, there’s all these people in the waiting room, some with very trivial problems in the grand scheme of things, but important problems to them who are getting these impressions and judgments of the doctor without understanding or appreciating what that doctor is actually going through, not just in terms of busy work, but also in terms of just like emotional distress that the doctor has to deal with. And it’s not that it has to have an answer, but just that you watch the show and these things come to your mind and it makes you think about it. I guess that’s what the humanities is about. 

DH 46:26 

Absolutely. Now, last thing then, sounds like you like the show. Sounds like you might love the show. What do you think of the show overall? For people who are thinking about maybe watching it, or who haven’t even heard of it. What do you want to tell them?  

SH 46:41 

Gosh, I will refrain from any of the sort of judgments or expectations that I feel like other physicians might have put on the general public with the show, because I’ve heard people say things like, Well, at least now, when people watch the show, they’ll understand what I’m going through, or they understand how hard it is. I’m not saying you got to get that from the show necessarily, or that you should get that from the show, because it’s still TV. But I think if you are at all curious about what it’s like to be a doctor in an emergency department, at least in this day and age, I’d say give this show a watch, and remember it’s TV, okay, remember it’s not actually real life, but it’s gonna give you some snippets that have a sense of realism that I think are worthwhile, but the show’s not gonna be for everybody. 

DH 47:33 

I will say, as I was watching the show, I had to catch myself several times because I was getting the feels about, you know, something that’s about to happen, one of the patients, or something’s about to happen one of the doctors. And I had to catch myself. I’m like, wait a minute, these are imaginary things. They’re imaginary characters. They’re not real. Why do I care? And I don’t get that feeling that often. You know what it’s like? It’s like, I was watching my children watch a Disney movie a while ago, and this was a few years ago when they were quite small, and when something really dramatic happened on the screen, they got scared, and they stood up, and they had to walk out of the room, and I’m like, kids, it’s not real, relax, right? But I realized this show grabbed me by the throat and made me believe it’s real, it just felt so real that I actually and then emotionally invested in it as a 47-year-old, cynical family doctor, I mean, that says it all, I love this show. And as a former ER fan, like I was gonna get buy-in for this show no matter what, we were gonna watch it whether it was good or bad. From what I’ve seen so far, this show is better than ER. This is just better, and people need to watch it, and then they need to come back and listen to our follow-up discussion about it on MedHum, on Apollo On Call.  

SH 48:48 

I’m certainly glad the show is not a sequel to ER. I’m glad they did a brand new thing. But you know what? The other thing I’ll add about this show is for doctors to maybe watch it, at least doctors in emergency departments to watch it. Because with ER, I knew the show tangentially because I just know stuff about pop culture, I suppose, but I didn’t really watch it religiously by any means. I didn’t watch even, like a fraction of it. I’ve seen clips here and there, but after I had gotten a certain point in medicine and I saw an episode, I realized, you know what, I think it might have helped or enhanced my education as a physician to have watched some of this show, especially at the beginning. And I feel like this show can enhance your education a little bit as a physician, which is a pretty good compliment for the realism of the show, I gotta say, if you’re asking if it’s realistic. 

DH 49:33 

All right, well, if you’ve enjoyed our conversation about The Pitt, come back to Apollo On Call. Dr. Harman and I are going to be talking about our actual impression having watched the entire show, maybe in a month, two months, all right, we’ll give you some time to digest this thing. But yeah, take that time, enjoy the show. Dr. Harman, it’s always a pleasure to get to talk to you. I know you need to run off to your emerg shift, so have a good shift. But we will see you back on Apollo On Call in not too long. 

SH 50:02 

Thank you very much. I guess after this talk about the show, even if I didn’t have a shift now, I’d have to pretend I do because I have to prove to people I’m as busy as Dr Robby. 

DH 50:13 

Apollo On Call is produced by MedHum.org. Special thanks to my co-host today, Dr. Stuart Harman. To hear some more of Stu and I discussing parenting and comic books, check out the Medical Dads podcast, available on Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. The theme song is Un Sospiro, performed by Dr. Justina Sam. For more medical humanities content, please check out MedHum.org. Thanks for listening. 

The Pitt Trailer

Images of Mats Sheen and Ibelin from Mats’ Facebook page and Medieoperatørene / Euforia

]]> https://medhum.org/review/film-review/dave_hsu/how-real-is-the-pitt/feed/ 0 The Remarkable Life of Ibelin https://medhum.org/review/film-review/dave_hsu/the-remarkable-life-of-ibelin/ https://medhum.org/review/film-review/dave_hsu/the-remarkable-life-of-ibelin/#respond Thu, 17 Apr 2025 12:28:42 +0000 https://medhum.org/?p=9971 From Apollo on Call–a Medhum Podcast
Mats Sheen

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is a 2024 documentary about the life of Mats Steen, a Norwegian man who died from complications of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. The movie explores how Mats, unbeknownst to the people around him, adopts a full online persona that allows him to experience the fullness of the human experience through a video game, experiences that were denied to him in the physical world because of his illness. 

I grew up during the nascent age of video games and home computers. While our parents looked at computers as tools that might help us in the future, as children, we looked at computers mostly as a source of fun. We crowded around arcade machines at convenience stores and arcades, throwing away quarters until our pockets emptied. We congregated at our friends’ houses after school and on weekends, befriending whoever was fortunate enough to have a console or a computer powerful enough to support the latest graphics. 

Mats’ online profile image (Ibelin)

Now though, as a parent and physician, my nostalgic view of video games is tempered by a mixture of skepticism and fear when it comes to games and internet technology. To hear the skeptics discuss it, video games are one of the root causes of the obesity epidemic, and online games and social media are part of the teen mental health crisis. Schools bring in experts to teach parents the perils of children spending time online while pediatricians pound out guidelines that describe “healthy limits on screen time.”  

This month, on Apollo On Call, we sit down to talk about video games and how there is another side to this narrative. We look at the story of Ibelin and talk about how video games may add to our lives in ways that many of us have never considered. 

Thank you, Mats, for showing us a different way to think about the online world. 

Luki and Dave 

TRANSCRIPT FROM THIS EPISODE

00:00 

Welcome to Apollo On Call, the podcast of MedHum.org. I’m your host, Dr. David Hsu. Hope you enjoy the show. 

00:18 

Alright, we are back on Apollo On Call, the podcast of MedHum.org and I’m your host, Dr. David Hsu, and I’m here with my co-host, Mr. Luki Danukarjanto, who is back, and we’re here to talk about movies.  

00:36 

LD: This is going to be a departure from our normal cadence, because we typically talk about books, but movies are a nice change.  

00:52 

DH: Alright. The movie that we’re talking about is The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, and it’s a really interesting movie. It exists right at the intersection of all the things we’re talking about – about medicine, life, death, technology. So Luki, give us a breakdown of what this movie is about and why we chose it. 

01:14 

LD: One of the reasons we chose it, it’s award winning. It won two awards at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, was Oscar nominated and, well, it is also available on Netflix. They made it accessible for us. But essentially, this story is about Mats Steen. He is a Norwegian man who has Duchenne’s. And Duchenne’s is a disease of, I guess, the neurological area where it confines him into a wheelchair. So basically, as a young boy, he’s able to walk around, and as he gets older, then he has less and less mobility. The first part of the story goes through his life, His parents try to take care of him the best they can. He becomes a little bit more challenged in terms of being able to live through life. He gets more confined to his wheelchair, and he ends up in the world of video games.[The film] shows his parents talking to him, and basically a little bit upset, because he lives in this video game world, and he misses various life events – I think there was some key outing that they all were looking forward to go to, which he didn’t want to go to, because he had some sort of video game online event. The first part of it ends with him passing away, and his parents understand that he has this blog site where he talks a little bit about his adventures, and they post about his departure and his funeral, and they post it online, and unbeknownst to them, they start getting responses, and not just one response or 10. I think hundreds, if not thousands, of responses of how Mats, or Ibelin, in the game that was his online character, how he touched their lives. And then the second part of the story really talks about how his parents uncover this whole new world and life that Mats Steen or Ibelin lived unbeknownst to them, and how many lives that he touched, what things he did, all in an online world that he wasn’t otherwise able to do in the real world because he was stuck in a wheelchair. So that’s the major premise. And Dave, what else would you add to it? 

03:55 

DH: I think you covered the main arc of the movie very, very well. I mean, that was basically everything that happened. The only thing I’m going to add is the game that he was actually playing was a game that people who know anything about computer games know about, and that’s World of Warcraft, which has been a very, very popular online game for more than 10 years, I think.  

04:14 

LD: I think it still has a following, and they keep releasing updates and things like that. So it probably isn’t as popular as it used to be, but I think it’s still fairly well-played. 

04:26 

DH: Right, now, people might be wondering, what does this movie have to do with MedHum, or medicine in the humanities? And actually, that was my initial take when I heard, you know, people talking about this movie during the MedHum, monthly meeting. But after I watched it, I was like, Okay, I kind of get this now because, you know, I went to medical school and did medical training, and I have this idea in my head that sure, there’s the humanities in medicine, like history of medicine, bioethics, science and society, these kind of topics, right? I didn’t think a movie about a video game or about a gamer would fit into this, but then I watched the movie, and I mean, of course, Mats is dying. He has a terminal illness. It’s a very sad story that way. But that’s definitely the medical angle in terms of how we access the story from a medical standpoint. But then this whole business about how the game can support his emotional well-being, and how the game can add to his mental health, and even so far as the movie continues, it actually doesn’t talk just about Mats. Some of these friends that he meets online enter the story in the second half of the movie, right? And we actually hear from them how much Mats helped them. They tell us about their own troubles, like, why were they on World of Warcraft? Why did they need Mats to help them through their personal life problems? And then you start to realize that the game is a therapeutic tool in a way, right? Which I never would have thought about before, right? I mean, honestly, most days when I think about games as a parent, I’m like, No more games. Turn off the computer to the kids all the time, right? So this presented this whole technology of gaming in a different light, and I thought it was really, really interesting, and made me really challenge my assumptions of what medical humanities is all about. It really broadened my understanding of it. So that’s what we’re here to talk about. 

06:36 

LD: It also puts a bit of a modern spin to it, because traditionally, you wouldn’t have thought video games, but with the prevalence of things like VR, it’s just a matter of time until more people will be sucked into these worlds. And with AI, who knows what’s going to happen with all that as well? So we’re probably just at the iceberg’s tip of all this coming through, and we probably need to watch more of these to be more prepared.  

07:05 

DH: Well I like it from the MedHum point of view, because it shows that we are at the cutting-edge of what is going on. Because there’s this idea that, you know, oh, you’re talking about medicine and the arts. It’s probably like some old book or that you’re going to read, right, some ancient text about something. But no, this is like cutting-edge modern stuff, and we’re here to break it down. Now, before we go any further, I think you and I should declare our bias. You know, people are always declaring their bias before these medical talks. Like, you know, I’m not an employee of this drug company, and so therefore I can give an unbiased opinion about such and such. We rarely will have the opportunity to do that. But regarding this movie, Luki, are you a gamer? Like, what is your stance on video games? 

07:48 

LD: I definitely was a gamer, for sure. I got into my career path, I took computer science as an undergrad because I wanted to code video games. I wanted to do that for a living, and so definitely growing up, it was a fixture of everyday life. Probably spent too many not restless nights on a console in front of a PC. 

08:19 

LH:Okay, so this is in your teens and 20s, I presume.  

08:23 

LD:Yeah. 

08:24 

DH: Okay, how about now? 

08:26 

LD: I’m a casual gamer, so right now I have some, I guess they’re called idle games, like little puzzle games that I probably spend too many hours than I should, right? They are a bit of a time suck, and then I’ll be like, Ah, I spent another hour or two on this stupid thing, and what did I gain from it? Not much. So I definitely have that, but not the hardcore console games. My kids have the Roblox, the Minecraft, the other things that they’re starting to get into. They try to get me to join their Brawl Stars club league or something, and I play with them a little bit, but that’s just more to help be that father figure to make sure they stay out of trouble. But okay, how about you, Dave, are you a gamer?  

09:15 

DH: I used to be a bit of a gamer, but it sounds like if we had to, if we had standings, you would be higher in the standings of gaming than I. I used to play games regularly, I remember growing up, I was fascinated by computers. I loved playing games, but I didn’t spend a ton of time on it, right? Like, yes, long afternoons after school lets out, weekends booting up the computer first thing in the morning, for sure, but I think by the time I got into adult life, you know, as a resident and then working as a physician, I’ve gradually drifted away from games. I know some of my buddies who still play a lot, but I’m definitely someone who has kind of left that. So actually, I’ve never played World of Warcraft. I don’t know, have you played that before?  

10:01 

LD: I have not. I know my younger brother did, and I would watch him play, try to understand his fascination with it. But I could see it, because at a point in time I probably would have jumped into that world. 

10:19 

DH: The World of Warcraft is the sequel to Warcraft II and Warcraft III, which are a couple outstanding classic games. 

10:27 

LD: Absolutely, but it was a little bit more expansive than I was used to, because in Warcraft you create farms and barracks and this giant world of stuff. 

10:41 

DH: Right, an entirely different type of thing, really. 

10:44 

LD: Exactly, so very much during that point in time I was immersed. I remember back in the day when we still had desktops, and laptops were like a luxury, we would bring our whole like tower units to people’s houses and have parties. So, we were of that ilk. But after getting into the adult working world, that kind of fell off a little bit and then kind of picked its way up on occasion when you find the right friends. Hey, we haven’t played blah blah blah in a while. So we play online and connect, but probably not as hardcore as Mr. Mats here. 

11:24 

DH: Definitely not as hardcore as this. Now, before we leave the disclaimer, you are a parent, you mentioned this that your kids do game a bit.  

11:32 

LD: Yeah.  

11:33 

DH: Are you okay with them gaming? Are you one of these reluctant to allow your kids to use technology parents? Where do you stand in that regard? 

11:41 

LD: I like to allow them to play, because kids should play. Now I don’t prefer them being on it, 24/7, that sort of thing, or even for the majority of the time, because I would love them to be outside and playing, doing something a little bit more physical, is definitely my stance, but at the same time, it’s part of the world, right? It’s not like they can avoid playing video games. It’s part of normal childhood nowadays. So do I want to take that away from them? No, but do I want them to be completely immersed and addicted to it? Absolutely not either. So it’s kind of that balance. But right, how about yours?  

12:27 

DH: Same, same. I mean, we’re reformed gamers from our youth, but conveniently we forget that when we talk to our children, we forget how into it we were, right?. The problem is the bells and whistles that come with games these days, it’s so enticing, not just for the kids, even dad wants to play, right? But I’m always the bearer of bad news, like I’m the bucket of cold water. Like these are bad for you. You don’t want to be addicted. You can play, but we’re gonna turn it off in 15 minutes. I’m always issuing these decrees, which, when I look back, are not things I would have wanted to follow as a kid at all. So I get the frustration that my children feel, but I also feel like games these days are a little bit different, like they really can take over your life, in a way. And I think this movie is going to talk about this, but from a different vantage point, because we’re so used to hearing about how bad games are for you and how bad your smartphone is, and how social media gives you anxiety, right? And leads to teen suicide and all these bad things about games. This movie, in its own little way, is telling us the opposite. So I think it’s worth talking about. 

13:36 

LD: I think it’s painting the entire game world with one broad brush, right? To say it’s all bad, but there are pockets which are very helpful for a lot of folks who have certain challenges. So in this particular case, Mats, who was confined to a wheelchair, right? Otherwise, most kids, you’d want them to go to the park and play. Well, that’s not an option for him, right? So he could go to the World of Warcraft and play with other folks there. So that’s kind of his outlet, where he can have his own life. And the movie showcases where he had this other life, right, that his parents didn’t even know. And I think one of the opening scenes was something with his dad talking about the eulogy at his funeral, where he says something to the effect where Mats, being confined to a wheelchair, will never having friends and falling in love and writing all these things. But as the second part of the movie goes through, then you actually recount that he went through all those emotions, but he did all that online, which was quite an interesting achievement. 

14:55 

DH: It’s interesting because if he wasn’t disabled, right, we might look at that and say, That’s kind of weird, right? Like, if you came and told me that, you know, your buddy doesn’t go out of his room, sits at home all day, and fell in love with someone online that he never met and had real feelings and real emotions for someone who he’s never met or seen – we would find this kind of odd, right? In this case, Mats, of course, he gets a pass because he’s ill. He cannot go outside, right? And, because of that, it changes our whole understanding of the things that have happened to him. It allows us to be a little bit more understanding, which I think is really important. One thing I’ll say is that, as a family physician, I have seen in my practice in the last few years, a handful of times patients, young people, usually male, but also a few female – there’s more than one of these in my practice, and I don’t have a huge practice, out of a couple thousand patients, this has happened like four or five times – where a child does not come out of their room. They hit teenagerness, and at some point as a teenager, they’re in their room all day, and the parents come to see me. They’re really frustrated, they think something’s really wrong with their child. Their child doesn’t come down to eat meals. Their child’s on the computer all the time, and when they try to turn off the computer, the child gets very upset, right? They’re smashing things, they’re threatening to kill themselves. The parents are at wit’s end, and this is a really new phenomenon. There’s no medical textbook that explains how to deal with this, because this is a really new thing. It’s happening just in the last couple, maybe just the last decade, or maybe in Asia it’s happening a little bit longer, right? And when parents see their child acting like this, they get scared, and this actually happens in the movie. As the movie progresses, one of Mats’ friends, a woman named Lisette, is part of the story, and she actually befriends Mats in the game. But at some point, she’s the one that he falls in love with. And at some point, she vanishes from the game, just completely disappears. And it turns out, in real life, her parents were fed up with her being on the computer all day, and made her log off and turned off the computer. Classic dictator parents style, right, without understanding why she needed to be there. And then they sent her off to school and she wasn’t allowed to log on, and it was a miserable year or two, I think, where this went on before she finally got allowed back into the game because Mats wrote her parents a letter. But I’ve seen this happen. I’ve seen this story from the angle of those parents. They come into my office at wits end, and no one knows what to do about it, right? The medical system says, Okay, maybe we’ll send them to a psychiatrist, right? Or sometimes, well, if he won’t come out of his room, can we send him to the emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation, right? I’ve seen emergency docs try to tell these kids you’re gonna go start going to school again, right? And then the kid agrees, and then maybe they go for a few days, but within a few weeks, the problem comes back again. So there’s something really insidious about the games, which I will admit this messes with me as a parent, because I see this and I’m like, okay, so these games are that addictive, right? So, son, we’re not gonna buy a Nintendo, sorry, right? But really that’s not fair. We’re drawing this generalization from these specific things that we’re seeing, but these specific things we’re seeing are so frightening, right? And this movie touches on all this and is asking us the question, are games all good or all bad, and if not, where should we stand on it? And why do people get into it? And why are people so addicted to it that they can’t stop playing? All of these questions get addressed to some degree, much more here than in any medical textbook or talk that I’ve ever attended. 

18:54 

LD: These are good questions and conversations to have with yourself, with your parents, your kids, depending on what life stage you are, because I think it’s one where it’s just gonna increase, right, with these games and virtual reality and whatever, there’s probably going to be more augmented reality, There’s another movie called Ready Player One, where he has an immersive set and basically everybody lives in two worlds, like the real world and this virtual one. And, well, I don’t know how long from now where that will be a regular thing, but it wasn’t too long ago when things like E Sports, weren’t around. But now, kids are making millions of dollars and a very good career playing video games.  

19:52 

DH: Now in the movie, Mats’ parents initially reluctantly allow him to become an avid gamer. They basically are like, okay, he’s got this terminal illness. There’s nothing else you can do, so we’re just gonna let him play games. It’s almost like saying this kid has suffered enough, we’ll just let him have some fun, right? And that’s totally cool, right? That makes complete sense as a parent, right? Like, what else are you gonna do as a parent? The funny thing, though, is the parents actually, by doing this, give Mats his whole life, right? They give him the key to humanity, finding emotional and human connection, without realizing. They think they’re just going to give him something to idle away the time, right? Time killer, pass some time, and it turns out to be a lot of time, right? But they’re like, honestly, what else is he gonna do, right? So that’s all that they think it is. And I think that, to me, my favorite part of the movie, is when they’re so startled when people start emailing them when they see that Mats has died, and they start to realize that their son, who had been sitting there on the computer and he could barely move by the end, so he’s just like fiddling with a mouse, staring at the screen. They probably just left him in the room for hours and hours, and didn’t interact with him too much. They probably never asked him what’s actually happening in the game. And in effect, he had this whole alter ego, right, that was like a fully formed adult person in the game that they knew nothing about. He was just sitting there in the room next to them, and they knew nothing about it. I just found that to be such a moving mental image that, to me, made the whole movie worth it, I was like, Luki, we gotta watch this. This is actually outstanding. 

21:36 

LD: I’m wondering how many of your patients might have a similar type of situation, where they might be living this whole new life, or a whole different life, absolutely, and their parents are kind of berating them and saying, like, what are you doing? You’re no good, blah, blah, blah. And meanwhile, they might be having all these amazing relationships and experiences online, and it’s just they’re doing it in a way that they can make sense of it, versus where, quote, unquote, we traditionally do so in the real world.  

22:11 

DH: In the movie, Mats actually gives us a potential answer for this, right? There is a character in the movie who also befriends Ibelin in the game. She’s a lady that has an autistic son. At some point in the game, she starts to share with Mats that she has a really difficult relationship with her son who can’t communicate with her and he is also playing World of Warcraft. So Mats suggests, why don’t you play the game with him? Right? And so they start playing the game together, and this becomes a bonding thing. They actually have a virtual hug and it changes the trajectory of her relationship with her son, right? So that whole thing was really eye opening, right? Because maybe it takes a person who plays the game and has lived the game and knows how therapeutic it is to understand. A patient comes into the medical office and they’re asking me, a reformed gamer, like I played video games 20 years ago. I’m like turn that thing off. Just like you, turn that thing off and get outside and exercise, right? Maybe we’re approaching this problem from the wrong angle. So I think there are some very neat messages that Mats teaches us in this movie. 

23:20 

LD: For sure, and it sounds like you have a new prescription to provide some of your patients as they come in.  

23:25 

DH: Next time, if your kid isn’t talking to you, make an avatar and get in the game and just see what they’re actually up to. A lot of times, I think that probably is true for parenting, right? We and our kids, we kind of veer off. We feel like we know what’s right for our kids without really knowing what’s going on with them. It doesn’t have to be this extreme, like in this game, but sometimes, maybe getting to understand what makes our kids tick is useful. But anyway, I’m just digressing into parenting world. 

23:52 

LD: Well, no, I think that’s an important part of the story. And it reminds me of some of the expressions that my kids talk about. So now they’ve got into the point where the younger one is recounting back in my day, because we say that as we’re talking and explaining why they should or shouldn’t do something, right? So it’s become a thing where he actually turns that type of voice, where he goes, back in my day, and whenever we recount something. So it is that perspective of a parent saying, Well, we know better than you, because when we were growing up, this is how it was. But it’s not how it was. So I think the movie points to having those conversations, taking those different perspectives, and that might be one of the solutions. Okay, play the game and get an understanding of what your kids are doing and well, whether you like it or not, whether you agree or not, but that should open your eyes and give you a slightly different perspective. So I think that’s, again, good messages from the story and to be honest, for me, when I was watching the movie at first, the moment where they post the message on his blog that he had passed away, and then you start getting all the blips for all the emails, and then another one. . 

25:19 

DH:.. and another one of them. I cried I had a bit of teary eyes during that whole part of it, and it was a very touching moment, because, it’s intense. Now I will say, I mean, I might as well just give a bit of a review of the movie. The second half of the movie, to me, was a hard watch, the movie gets, it gets pretty dark, right? He’s getting sick, and it’s not like an uplifting like Saturday night at the movie theater, it’s intense, and I guess we expected it, and there’s some really emotional stuff that happens. It’s not just that he’s getting sick, because we kind of know that’s going to happen, but we’ll talk a bit more about this later, but overall, I think the movie is really, really important, and really looks at this gaming thing from a whole different angle than what we’re used to seeing, but it is not a super easy movie to watch, just so people can brace themselves. Alright, let’s switch up a little bit, because you had written down that you wanted to talk a little bit about this whole concept of disability and terminal illness, so I’m curious what you wanted to talk about here. 

26:22 

LD: Well, for me, one of the bleaker parts of the story is having a child, having a family member that has a terminal illness. So I take a look at some folks, some families, some people, where their lives revolve around this person, right? They can’t travel, they can’t do this, they can’t do whatever, because they have to take care of, or when they do travel, it has to be in a slightly different way, right? So it’s just calling out how people with those types of challenges, they sacrifice a lot, and they’re like mini heroes, I guess, in being able to… 

27:10 

DH: Not mini heroes, mega heroes. 

27:14 

LD: Mega heroes, for being able to basically give up a “normal life” in order to care for someone, right? So that’s a little bit of that, because when growing up, we didn’t really have anybody with any terminal illnesses. But my grandfather, before he passed away, had Alzheimer’s and kidney failure, so we had to go through dialysis. So there were years where basically, our schedules revolved around him, right? Someone always had to be home to change his dialysis bag. Someone had to do whatever, and we couldn’t travel as much. So, and in full honesty, there was my part being a selfish kid, there’s a little bit of resentment. 

DH: You were gaming.  

28:04 

LD: Well, if I was gaming, I’d have to interrupt my game to, like, change my grandfather’s dialysis bag. So again, what an idiot, or what a selfish being I was.  

28:20 

DH: We all are, ultimately, right. 

28:22 

LD: But it’s one of those things where it’s just calling to mind where there are folks who are very privileged, and there are folks that make other sacrifices for the ones they loved, and it’s thinking about at some point, there’s probably going to be aging parents, that some of us are going to have to deal with some of that in life, and, yeah, who knows what sort of challenges. So it’s just putting another perspective, another piece of gratitude, I would say, for folks to just appreciate everybody’s healthy, and everybody’s able to do whatever you want, then, just count your lucky stars. So that’s what I wanted to talk a little bit about terminal illness or disabilities – have you encountered it in your life, or what sort of challenges has it brought forth?  

29:23 

DH: I have not really dealt with this in the form of a child so much. I mean, I’ve seen it with my patients. I know in the families there’s a child that’s really ill, and you see how much pressure it puts parents under. You know, my dad has been ill with dementia for more than a decade, so you kind of see that decline, which many people have seen. I mean, fortunately, Duchenne and muscular dystrophy isn’t that common, so this isn’t something a lot of people encounter. I think the movie does a really good job of showing us, showing everybody, you know, what this illness is like, what the family has to go through, what Mats’ life is like. I think it paints a really nice picture of that, because we need to see that as people. We forget about this stuff too easily, right? Like when we talk about healthcare policy or parenting, or even the role of video games in the world, right? We are always thinking about it from the standpoint of robust, young, healthy kids and their overstressed parents or something, right? But actually, there are people who have to deal with much, much more complicated variations of life, and I think this movie does a really good job of that. And in that sense, I do think it’s actually a movie that people should watch. And, you know, even our children, as they get a little bit older, they should probably see it, and it gives a bit of sense of balance, you know. The things that you’re complaining about, they’re not real issues, right? When you see what Mats has to go through. So on this level, kudos to the movie for showing us this.  

30:53 

LD: I like towards the end that, I think they had a section where he was doing some public service announcements on the use of some of the mobility tools or access tools for someone with handicaps or disabilities and things like that, so the little devices that he can click and access and but that’s another amazing part, where if you have limited mobility, he was still able to navigate an entire world, but he couldn’t really stretch and push or type or all that stuff. And I guess one of the points in the movie is that they didn’t, or he’d never want to join their group calls or group meetings or something, because my guess is that he probably couldn’t have. Couldn’t speak as well.  

DH: If he had to do a group call, and it’s like a video chat, people would see that he looked strange to them, right? He could have turned off his camera, he was being self-conscious about that too, which all makes sense. I don’t think I thought about the gratitude part of this movie until you talked about it just now. But it does really hit me, because I’ve been thinking about it so much from the academic viewpoint, right? Like, what is the video game angle, and the humanities angle, but I think this very basic angle is actually probably the best way to view the movie, because it really gets to the underlying humanity of it, that most of us should actually appreciate where we are and stop worrying about stuff.  

Score one for the non-clinician, yeah. 

32:37 

LD: I have started on this trek to always see if I can pull it back to gratitude, right? Because, to be honest, wherever you are, if you’re able to listen to this podcast, you’re in a good spot, right? Think about that. So I’ve been saying this to a bunch of folks, is that your worst day is someone else’s dream. 

The fact that you have access to a podcast player means you probably have access to some sort of smartphone device, right, and data and stuff, that you’re probably in the first world, right?. And yes, you may have challenges or money problems or whatever, but at least you don’t have Duchenne’s. And for those of you who do, and you’re listening, props to you, but the fact that you’re able to listen here right, and do whatever it is that you can do, there’s so much to be grateful for. 

33:50 

DH: Absolutely. Now, one thing I wanted to talk a little bit about is this whole business of what’s the purpose of life? This movie does get to this in the later part, right? Mats himself says something like, I need to know. I’m just gonna paraphrase, it’s not a direct quote, but he basically says something like, I need to know that I affected other people’s lives so that my life will have meaning. Otherwise, the whole point of it would have been for not, right? And this, to me, is a really interesting take, because this is a kid. I mean, he’s young. I’m gonna call him a kid, but he’s like, 20 something, but he’s a young guy with a terminal illness. He, more than anyone else in the world, probably could just say, screw it, and be selfish and be like, You know what? They gave me a bad hand, I’m miserable, like, I’ll just enjoy my life and whatever. But he actually says, I want to make a difference to people, and he does make a difference. He goes out of his way in the game to get to know people, befriend them, befriend them in a real, in a meaningful way, and does affect their lives. He brings people closer to their families and brings them closer to emotional healing many times, it’s recounted throughout this movie. I found it fascinating that he had such a strong will to do this. And sometimes the rest of us, getting to your point, we forget about gratitude, right? We’re miserable, even though we have the ability to do all this stuff to help people and be part of the community and care. We’re too busy being annoyed about the state of the government or taxes and whatnot, right? So I thought this was a really interesting thing, that he had this ambition to help people. That’s one part. The second thing that I thought was really interesting was that, as the movie goes on, and this is where I think it becomes a bit of a tough watch, because, it’s not just that he’s getting physically ill. The fact that he’s hiding the truth of his actual condition from all the other players in the game starts to take a toll, right? Like, at some point he starts to, he starts to have difficulty, I think it’s with one of his fingers. He can’t push the buttons fast enough. And part of World of Warcraft, you actually have to participate in fights against villains and monsters. He can’t fight in those things where he gets defeated easily, right? And people don’t really understand why, and he can’t explain it. He starts to get testy with the people around him. He sees that his girlfriend in the game is talking to another guy and gets jealous and starts to try to pit people against other people, right? He becomes a little bit of a nasty individual for a while, until the other players in the game decide that we need to have an intervention. Mats, what is going on with you? This stuff was really strange to watch because it was reenacted in the form of the game with the video game character graphics, but all at the same time, it was so real, like, this is actual real life. This happens to people, right? And he’s exhibiting all the classical signs of someone who’s just very angry and emotionally unconnected. And then where he finds healing at the end is when he finally confronts, is confronted by someone, and tells them the truth, and people start to understand that, oh, that’s why he’s being this way. And they start to understand. And I was just like, this is so heavy. This is so heavy and what he needed all along was actual emotional connection, right? And somehow he maybe couldn’t articulate it, but he needed that, even though this is a kid who has a loving family, he’s got a terminal illness, he has no way to articulate, but what he really needs is to be connected to the people around him and to find meaning in his life and to be helping others. I found that the fact that that underlying humanity could come through despite the Duchenne and the fact that he was almost like really end-stage at this point to be really moving.  

37:54 

LD And I guess going back to your original question about the purpose of life, perhaps he found it.  

And for me, it’s to help others, and it’s the impact. On my side, the people I connect with are always on the career coaching piece, and people are looking for titles and money and moving up. But ultimately, when you get down to it, it’s how am I contributing to others? And what Mats said is like, how am I changing the world? How do I matter? But it’s not about changing the world. It’s about changing your world, right? So impacting the people around you, whether it’s your family, whether it’s the World of Warcraft and people online. I think they had his guild that he joined, and people were helped, and all those messages that he got were because, oh, Mats helped me through a trying time in my life, and he listened, and he paid attention. So sometimes just a sympathetic ear is all it takes to help and being there. It doesn’t necessarily take money or power or fame, but it’s that contribution, it’s that helping out and being there and present. Seems like he found his purpose. Now that doesn’t mean everybody should go online and start becoming a therapist for everybody there, but figuring out what is that purpose for, for you is always a very interesting journey that you’ll have to be on. But yeah, it seems like even someone with Duchenne’s who shouldn’t be able to or has everything stacked against them, still has that ability, then I guess there’s hope for the rest of us.  

39:48 

DH: I would hope so, I would hope so. Now, anything else you want to add about the movie? 

39:56 

LD: No, I think we covered a lot of it. To me, it’s taking away that broad brush to say that all video games are bad. Oftentimes, you don’t understand it as well, because it’s one of those areas where I think people find escape, people find peace, people find connection and relationships in different ways, For most people, it’s real life, meeting people at events, at parties, at school get-togethers but more and more, it’s meeting people online. And that’s more and more the norm. But again, what is the world becoming, right? Over the Christmas holidays, we actually got a VR headset. And there is this world out there. Now, right now, it’s not really that clear, but I could see it eventually. You could actually immerse yourself in this. And maybe something similar to what Ibelin, what Mats had gone through. There’s going to be more and more people lost in that world, where I can picture professional networking events, where you just attend and you have this avatar, and you’re walking to a conference that’s happening, I don’t know, halfway across the world, right? And you meet and “build” relationships there, as if you were there, but you’re online, right? So it’s going to be a different world. And the interesting part, I think you touched on it, is where the medical establishment doesn’t know how to deal with it. 

41:48 

DH: Well not just medical, l the education establishment doesn’t know how to handle it. Parents don’t know how to handle it. Nobody knows how to handle this stuff. It’s too new. 

41:56 

LD: I think you had it right, where, at the end of the day, it’s all about connection. I think that’s the key, whether it’s in real life, whether it’s online, whether it’s wherever, once you find that connection, once you find your tribe, oftentimes that’s where you will spend the most of your time. So I actually had a conversation about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where you have, the physiological needs and then safety, and then relationships is somewhere in the middle. Well, maybe he got it wrong, where relationships need to be the foundation. Because if you think about it, for babies, like, what can they do? So it’s the relationships and the parents, and it’s everyone around them that takes care of them. And if you think about it, so Mats’ family, or anybody else who has a strong set of folks that take care of them, they will always be taken care of, right? They will take care of their physiological needs, right? Whereas someone who has all their physiological needs, all the money, all the food, everything set without relationships, it’s a mess. It’s a mess, right? So maybe if we focus on our relationships, and actually, I’ve been talking to more folks where people are focusing on their physical health. Great. You go to the gym, workout three days a week, 60 minutes, all that sort of stuff. Awesome. Now more folks are taking care of their mental health, where I’m meditating 5, 10 minutes every day, right? Cool, awesome. But how many of us actually focus on our social health, right? Do we allocate 30 minutes a week, an hour a week, to reconnect with friends, family, whomever is closest to us, just to say hi? And I’m guilty of that myself, right? Where I kind of wish that I had a better relationship with my siblings, right? So we have, like, a weekly Zoom chat with my family. But all we talk about is superficial stuff. How’s the week? Oh, yeah, we had this, this happen, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what about, like, the more deeper conversations with the ones closest to you, your good friends and stuff like, how much time do we allocate for that? And if that’s as good, or should be as good as our mental or physical health, then I think you hit the nail on the head with that whole connection piece, as you were talking about that. I think that’s the most important part, which I think the movie is highlighting in spades.  

44:42 

DH: Oh, you said it so well, I’m not going to add anything to that point. The last thing that I will add is that this movie did teach me a lot about medical humanities. I never really appreciated the role of technology in medical humanities, right? I guess maybe because I always thought about the history of medicine and I know that medicine is always advancing forward, and that there’s new research and new medical treatments, like we talked about the new treatments for cancer last month. But the world is always changing, and because the world is changing and throwing these new technologies at us, it creates new scenarios. So there’s all this new cutting-edge stuff happening in medical humanities. This stuff is actually very, very fresh, right? And I thought that was eye opening to me, because I had this idea when we started the podcast, you and I would read some old books, and that would be it. But this is actually much more cool than that. We’re talking about tech and tech is a fundamental part of it. It was in the cancer book too, right? The cancer book was all about how the world keeps pushing forward. We’re finding new ways to combat new illnesses that are developing. Here, you know, there’s going to be good and bad for video games, right? It’s going to create some problems. It’s going to solve some other problems. It’s all very convoluted and complex, and it’s good that we’re able to have a conversation to get some of these ideas out there. 

46:09 

LD: I’d echo all that sentiment, and I guess we’re in early days, because this is medical humanities, but as humans, we’re evolving, and technology is helping us to evolve. So if we were to record another podcast like this in a year, in five and 10 years, who knows what the next advancement will be, and yeah, we might have been like, ah, remember back in 2025 when we’re talking about blah blah blah, back in my day, and blah, blah, blah, those types of things. 

46:44 

DH: Absolutely. But overall, I’ve really enjoyed the movie. It is hard. It’s not an easy movie to watch, but it gives you a lot to think about. I think people should try to check it out. There aren’t a lot of movies that jump out at me as being medical humanities things that has this much to say, and I think this is one of them. One thumb up from me. 

47:08 

LD: I’d agree. Well, it’s not a no-brainer popcorn flick on the weekend, so it takes a little bit more of effort and brainpower and just making sure that you’re there and if you have a box of tissues for key moments, that might be helpful too. I agree. I’d give it another thumbs up.  

47:26 

DH: We’re all evolved men. There’s nothing wrong with crying once in a while, it’s all part of the emotional connection thing. So that’s our discussion about Ibelin. Check out the movie. We highly recommend it. There’s a lot to think about. If you have any thoughts, comments about the movie, if you’ve seen it, or just questions for us, hit us up on the MedHum website. There’s a link where you can comment, we’ll try to reply. Otherwise, see you in a month. 

48:18 

Apollo On Call is produced by MedHum.org. Special thanks to my co-host, Mr. Luki Danukarjanto. To hear some more of Luki and I discussing books, please check out the W5H Book Club Podcast available on Spotify and Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. Today’s theme song is Un Sospiro performed by my wife, Dr. Justina Sam. For more medical humanities content, please check out MedHum.org. 

Thanks for listening. 

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin Trailer

Images of Mats Sheen and Ibelin from Mats’ Facebook page and Medieoperatørene / Euforia

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