Almost all of the doctors in this series seem to have serious personal issues. They may be exceptional doctors, but each in his or her own way is pretty screwed up. I'm not familiar with statistics on the extent to which patients have trust in their doctors today, but it's a good guess that their trust was greater in the days of Doctor Kildare and Marcus Welby M.D. Even when they succeed in saving someone after 45 minutes, today's medical television programs are by far more interesting and compelling than their predecessors. But they've become this way by telling us more and more about their non-professional lives, and more often than not those lives are pretty screwed up. Because of this the interest that we now take toward these characters probably also hampers our faith in their ability to take care of us. We're often warned that being hospitalized can be bad for us because in hospitals we're exposed to numerous pathogens. Maybe we should also avoid them because we're also exposed to doctors.