The Power of "The Pitt" and Passive Public Health
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Maggie Parker January 16, 2026 at 12:21 AM
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The Power of "The Pitt" and Passive Public Health
Ashely Alker, MD, M.Sc, has never watched The Pitt — but she's a huge fan. The emergency room doctor and author of the new book 99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them has a really good reason for not tuning in, though — one that the creators would probably appreciate. "People have told me all about it, every detail. It's way too realistic," Dr. Alker tells us. "I've had all the cases depicted on the show: For instance, I've had post-tonsillectomy bleed in a 5-year-old where he's passing out, bleeding into a bag, filling buckets, and I knew of a patient in that situation who died," she says, referring to a scenario also depicted in season 1 of the HBO series. "This isn't something that's fun for me to watch."
But she's grateful for how precisely The Pitt portrays ER medicine, and she's not alone. It's been lauded as one of the most accurate medical procedurals ever and is constantly praised by healthcare professionals.
That's in part because co-creator and star Noah Wyle isn't new to medicine…on TV. He was one of the stars of ER, alongside George Clooney and Julianna Margulies. He goes to extreme lengths to portray medicine responsibly, including a two-week medical boot camp for the cast before filming.
"Taking the time to get it right is better for the art, and more importantly, it’s better for passive public health education," says Dr. Alker, who's also a medical script consultant for TV. "If we have an opportunity to educate a captive audience — especially now, in this age of massive misinformation — we have to take it. That’s what The Pitt is doing."
In our interview, Dr. Alker shares the heartbreaking personal reason she entered medicine, and how an inability to influence in the ER led her to Hollywood.
Katie Couric Media: Medical procedurals have been around for decades, but few have achieved the success of The Pitt. Why does The Pitt stand out right now?
Dr. Alker: It all started with ER. A lot of medical dramas came out around the same time as The Pitt, many of which weren’t very good. But The Pitt did what ER did the first time: The big difference is accuracy.
People assume that when medical shows aren't accurate, only medical professionals care. That’s not true. Viewers are smarter than creators often give them credit for. They can feel when something doesn’t ring true — and it ruins the show and the viewers' experience.
Accuracy also matters for public health and education. There are studies that prove that. Studies show that when CPR is portrayed inaccurately on TV, viewers are more likely to perform CPR incorrectly in real life. Obviously, health professionals would prefer everyone take a CPR class, but if you have a captive audience, you have an opportunity to educate.
Is that passion how you ended up in emergency room medicine?
The reason I went to medical school goes back to my mom. She had lymphoma after I was born, and after her cancer treatment, her life was riddled with complications from the radiation. She had two open-heart surgeries, brain surgery, pulmonary hypertension, and autoimmune hepatitis. It was a lot of medicine, and not a lot of people explaining it in a way we could understand. That experience is what pulled me into medicine. I became the medical person in our family because we often didn’t understand what was happening, and there was no one to translate the medical jargon for us.
Unfortunately, in my third year of medical school, my mom died during her second open-heart surgery. I graduated and felt like I had lost my sense of purpose. That's when I started writing.
I also had a graduate degree in public health because I thought medicine was too one-on-one — the impact would be small.
The exam room, especially the emergency department, isn’t where broad education happens. When someone’s dying, they don’t want to learn. They want you to fix it.
I give patients the information they need to make the best decision for them, but the emergency department isn’t a great place to explain how things work. It’s fast-paced, and it’s about lives.
Is that disconnect what pushed you toward entertainment?
Yes. That’s why I started thinking about how we portray these things and how we make them accurate. There are different types of medical consulting for TV. I've been doing mostly technical consulting and screenwriting consulting for specific medical scripts. I've worked on The Act, The Handmaid’s Tale, Bull, Station 19, Chicago Med, The Resident, and Days of Our Lives. My favorite experiences are actually the non-medical shows, though. And now I'm writing some of my own scripts.
I also started Meaningful Media, a nonprofit that connects creators — authors, screenwriters, journalists, influencers — with public health professionals so they can create accurate, evidence-based storylines or fact-check their work.
How have you witnessed entertainment play a role in public health?
When you tie something to emotion, that’s the strongest way to get human beings to act — that’s how we’re wired.
If you can put something on television or in a story and get people to empathize or put themselves in a character’s position, that’s how progress happens. We tend to separate ourselves from other people, and storytelling helps bridge that gap.
Life imitates art as much as art imitates life. The media is very powerful.
You said you can’t really watch The Pitt. Why not?
It’s too accurate. From what I’ve heard, it compresses a lot of a medical career into a single day — and that’s what it feels like to work in emergency medicine.
But people have told me everything about The Pitt, and while I don't watch it, I love it.
People forget what doctors do. They forget that we work 365 days a year — holidays, weekends, funerals, birthdays. They forget that many of us paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this job and gave up years of our lives.
If we continue to marginalize the profession and act like doctors don’t know what they’re doing, people are going to stop going into medicine. And that’s dangerous.
What The Pitt shows is competency. Noah Wyle has called it competency porn. It shows what doctors actually do day to day — the parts people don’t see or don’t remember.
Even if I’m not part of it, I’m very proud of what they’re doing.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
