It is hard to believe that people really rely on TV to learn about medicine and healthcare. I’m not talking about documentaries, but primetime shows and daytime soaps. While there has been much written on this, I am going to again say that these shows are not meant to be a learning experience. They are entertainment and often highly distorted–in other words, have little to do with the real world of healthcare.

But people still take them as the gospel truth. In a study that was recently presented at a neurology conference, the researchers found that TV does a miserable job of presenting seizures and first aid with any sort of accuracy.

“Television dramas are a potentially powerful method of educating the public about first aid and seizures,” study author Andrew Moeller, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, in Nova Scotia, Canada, was quoted as saying. “Our results, showing that television shows inaccurately showed seizure management half the time, are a call to action. People with epilepsy should lobby the television industry to adhere to guidelines for first aid management of seizures.”

The researchers screened all episodes of the highest-rated U.S. medical dramas including “House,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Private Practice” and the last five seasons of “ER” for scenes involving seizures. Of 59 seizures that occurred, 51 took place in the hospital. When measured against guidelines on seizure management, researchers found inappropriate practices — including holding a person down, trying to stop involuntary movements or putting something in a person’s mouth — occurred 46 percent of the time.

So if you are interested in learning first aid, please don’t rely on medical fiction. Take a course with the Red Cross instead.