Almost any night of the week you can have your pick of medical TV shows. You got your "Scrubs," "Grey's Anatomy" and "House." If reality TV is your thing, take your pick from "Untold Stories of the ER" on TLC and "Dr. 90210" on E!. Even the crime shows, like "Law and Order" and "CSI," break over into the health TV genre from time to time.

So it should come as no surprise that people are gleaning health information from these shows that they then rely on in real life. (Read "Shows raise awareness, but distort expectations" on the cover of Eye Street in Sunday's Californian.)

A 2001 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 52 percent of prime time TV viewers think the health information in the shows is accurate and 26 percent say prime time TV shows are among their top three sources for health information.

While in some respects this is a scary statistic ("Grey's Anatomy" had a pregnant man in one episode for crying out loud!), these shows can be used as a public health tool, some experts have said.

“Not only are they reaching to more people, they’re getting through to them and having an impact,” said Vicky Rideout, director of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Program for the Study of Entertainment Media and Health, at the Association of Health Care Journalists conference I recently attended. (AHCJ's site has a podcast and webcast of the entertainment and health round table if you would like to learn more.)

The Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed "ER" viewers about what they learned from the show before and after episodes came out.

Viewer recognition of HPV, the virus that can cause cervical cancer, almost doubled after a short vignette on the show in 2000 in which nurse Carol Hathaway explains to a teenage patient that her cervical cancer could be related to the virus. The survey found that 24 percent of viewers had heard of HPV before the episode. One week after the episode, this grew to 47 percent, and five weeks later this leveled off at 38 percent.

Similarly, awareness of emergency contraception went from 50 percent before the episode to 67 percent after the episode. The entire vignette, which was part of an "ER" episode that aired April 10, 1997, lasted almost three minutes with the discussion about emergency contraception lasting only 20 seconds.

I guess I can see this. As an avid fan of a lot of these shows, I often have those "Wow, I think I just learned something" moments. After having the light bulb go off over my head, I usually tell myself to look up what I just learned later to verify if it's true. (Like "abulia," which a woman was afflicted with in last week's "House." This is a true condition, by the way. "House" characterized it as a lack of free will. MedlinePlus' medical dictionary defines it as an "abnormal lack of ability to act or to make decisions that is characteristic of certain psychotic and neurotic conditions." House's version sounds much more interesting, though.)

But unfortunately, I usually forget to do this a few minutes after telling myself to.

How much do you trust the health information on these shows? Have you learned anything from them?

Have you ever consulted a doctor about a condition you learned about on a medical TV show?