What do doctors and med students do to unwind after a long day of rounds, surgery and emergencies?

They flip on the television and watch rounds, surgery and emergencies.

Given our national obsession with health and medicine, it's not surprising that there's been a resurgence of doctors on TV, in shows from Fox's "House" to ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" and its spinoff, "Private Practice," to NBC's long-running "ER" and the comedy "Scrubs."

What is surprising is that some of the shows' biggest fans are doctors.

After a difficult day of dissection, University of Minnesota medical students chill by watching "Grey's Anatomy" together. And in a case of life imitating art, some physicians at med schools are finding that pop culture can spark rich discussions on what it means to be a doctor.

In a recent episode, Dr. House had a patient with suspected aspergillus, a fungus infection.

"We're like: 'Ah! We just studied aspergillus!'" said Maiken Overton, a second-year medical student at the University of Minnesota Medical School. That got Overton and her roommates started on which symptoms they'd expect to see.

They empathize when TV characters struggle with the universal dilemmas of being a doctor -- such as whether to stay and save lives or go home to your family. And like the rest of us, med students are suffering some withdrawal symptoms as the TV writers' strike sends their shows into reruns.

A lot less romance

The doctors onscreen these days are a far cry from the dignified Dr. Kildare of the 1960s or Marcus Welby of the 1970s. They are more multifaceted and human. Sometimes too human.

You'll probably never meet a doctor as rude as House in real life. And the surgical interns in the soap opera that is "Grey's Anatomy" have so many romantic entanglements that you wonder how they ever find time to see patients.

"If people come to a hospital expecting a couple in every broom closet, they won't find them," said Dr. Felix Ankel, an ER physician at Regions Hospital in St. Paul. "Most people are quite busy."

Of course, there are very real aspects of medicine that will never ever make good TV. Just as cop shows focus on car chases and cooking shows never make you wait an hour for a cake to bake, medical dramas compress time.

By definition, they aren't going to depict events that are, well, undramatic -- such as the often lengthy waits for lab test results. Or the fact that ER doctors aren't always bursting through swinging doors to treat you the minute you walk in.

"I have yet to see a show called 'Waiting Room,'" said Ankel.

Pretty darn realistic

But doctors note that the medicine on TV has become much more realistic over the years as writers enlist medical experts to shape story lines. Commentators such as the West Coast medical student who writes the blog Over My Med Body! pounce on errors, such as the time Grey's residents got their CPR technique wrong. But for the most part, doctors say, the medicine is pretty accurate.

That wasn't always the case. In the early 1980s, during a scare over tampons and toxic shock syndrome, representatives from the series "Quincy, M.D." approached Pat Schlievert, a world-class microbiologist at the University of Minnesota.

They proposed a story where Jack Klugman, the actor who played Quincy, would show up at Schlievert's office. The TV doctor and the real-life microbiologist would confer and conclude that tampon manufacturers were deliberately putting compounds in tampons that would allow bacteria to grow. Schlievert balked. Made no business sense, he said. The episode was never made.

These days, he's an unabashed fan of that famous TV diagnostician: Dr. House. But there are times when watching the TV docs can be maddening. Like the time when House helped hasten a death in order to harvest the heart and save the dead guy's son. (Unrealistic, said Schlievert.) Or anytime House orders his interns to break into patients' homes to find clues to their illnesses. (Ditto.)

"Do I ever yell at the TV screen? Sure, when they do the really stupid stuff," said Schlievert.

But still, he says he never misses an episode. "We see ourselves partly in them," he said.

TV docs as teachers

The past fall, Dr. Jon Hallberg asked about 80 pre-med honor society students at the University of Minnesota how they get their information. The newspaper? Online? A smattering of hands went up.

How many watch "Grey's Anatomy"? Every hand in the room shot up.

It showed Hallberg that medical educators will have to start speaking the language of pop culture if they want to reach students.

"We're starting to shift away from thinking that everything needs to be taught in a lecture," said Hallberg, a family physician at the university who's known for his frequent appearances on Minnesota Public Radio.

At the university's Medical School, a professor recently showed his class a scene from "ER" in which doctors heatedly debated which drugs to use on a patient with heart failure. Then he launched into a lecture on drug interactions.

The lessons can extend to the more humanistic aspects of being a doctor. And they can inject some fun into a serious business.

Ankel, the Regions doctor, oversees ER residents at the hospital.

He recently showed a YouTube clip of Britain's "Got Talent," the British version of "American Idol," where a cell phone salesman from Wales sings opera, wowing judges and bringing the audience to its feet. The idea was to illustrate the difference between a job, a profession and a calling.

And instead of nagging doctors and residents to talk more often, he trots out the lyrics to Blondie's "Call Me."

Chen May Yee • 612-673-7434