I like being a volunteer paramedic but one rather small side effect is that I always observe how horribly wrong most movies and TV shows handle medical stuff of any kind. Sometimes there are only minor errors, sometimes rather big flaws happen.
Of course some movies are more precise than others, so I tried to get points that use for most of them.
Applying a tourniquet above or under a wound is something you see in movies almost every time someone has a bleeding that is more than a slight scratch. In reality, this process is highly controversial among experts since it does not only hurt the affected limb severely, but when a body part is cut off from blood supply, toxic substances begin to work quickly and when the blood flow is restored, these substances can be life threatening. Because of that, health authorities in many countries already decided to ban the convenience of tourniquets from the list of measurements taught at first-aid classes and advise paramedics and emergency doctors to use it in extreme cases only.
Whenever someone loses a finger (or a toe or something else) in a movie, putting the severed part on ice is the foremost thing they do before rushing to the hospital. While it is advisable to preserve the target in question cool (and germ free), actually freezing it would cause irreparable cell damage, especially in cases of point link to the ice.
While giving birth is without a question a really painful experience, it is in most cases not as grave and agonizing as most movies illustrate it to be. In industrial countries with a modern medicine system, approximately 95% of all births go down without any complications and 4 out of the remaining 5% only feature minor problems.
The fact that only doctors are allowed to formally declare someone short is widely known, still almost every movie chooses to cut it. But still when we graciously overlook that, the methods used to evaluate a patients condition range from trying to find the pulse (which is a function that is not used anymore to find whether somebody is dead or not) to thrust the soul or even just look at him/her (not a joke, I scarcely saw that a week ago). And if the characters come to the decision that the patient is dead, in many cases they do not try to reanimate him/her for no ostensible reason - which is not only stupid and morally wrong but also criminal. By the way, this leads immediately to my lowest point.
Reanimation scenes in movies are likely not just the most frequent medical scenes but likewise the ones with the most errors. Most movies feature so many mistakes that you could probably save a second list about them. Common mistakes include the following subjects:
Speed - most movie-CPRs are way too slow, the right speed is 100 bpm, which is coincidentally the race of the Bee Gees "Stayin` alive" ( or Queens "Another one bites the dust", which has a somewhat more morbid double meaning).
Ratio - The right ratio between chest compression and breathing is 30:2 for an adult, not 3:1 or 3:2 as seen in many movies.
Defibrillation - The primary application for defibrillators is ventricular fibrillation, meaning the muscle fibers of the centre are contracting completely uncoordinated resulting in a want of blood flow. In the example of asystole (no heart activity at all, the famous "flatline"), a defibrillator is useless until CPR restores some form of heart activity.
Duration - Most reanimation scenes in movies only have a few minutes before the patient is declared dead. In reality, reanimations take at least 45 minutes and can be expanded to several hours.
Another interesting fact not immediately attached to movies is that with every single hour without CPR, the chances of renewing a patient with cardiac arrest drop between 5 and 10 percent. So always update your knowledge about first aid, because one day it might prove useful to you.
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