Cliches: Health-Related Situations

All medical dramas have cliches, but Korean dramas have some of the most interesting cliches regarding health-related situations:

1. If you are working too hard or over-exerting yourself, this will be indicated by a nose bleed.
2. When you are troubled, you will suffer from some ailment like a fever or constipation.
3. If you go out with wet hair, will get sick with a fever.
4. If you spend too much time outside in the cold, you will become sick and develop a fever. This will happen within 6 hours rather than a couple of days.
5. If you have a fever, you will be cured not by taking medicine, but by a magic washcloth that is applied to your forehead throughout the night.
6. When people are sick, they will eat porridge.
7. When you are sick or hurt, you will be cured with a good night's sleep. Even if you’ve broken a bone or been beaten up quite badly.
8. If you’re sick, an IV will also cure you overnight.
9. If you have an IV, it always remains full.
10. If you’ve collapsed, someone will either carry you by piggyback to the hospital or drive you urgently in the car. No one will call an ambulance.
11. Everyone will go to the same hospital, no matter where in Seoul they are.
12. At some point in the drama someone will throw up. People only throw up when are drunk or extremely ill, such as having a brain tumor. If you’re a woman and haven’t been drinking, it means that you are pregnant. And if you’re a woman and you throw up on a man, you will later fall in love with each other.
13. If someone is shot or stabbed, no matter where, it will kill them or leave them near death. Unless they have super human abilities.
14. When in bed at the hospital, a humidifier will be on.
15. If you’ve gotten in a fight or cut yourself, ointment from the drug store will make sure that the wound never scars. And because of the ointment, the wound never leaves a scar.
16. If you’re constipated or having diarrhea, the drug store will give you something that will stop it immediately.
17. If someone is in a coma or an extended period of unconsciousness, the first signal that they are reviving is finger twitching.
18. If someone has been in a coma for an extended period of time, his/her muscles will not have atrophied and they will be able to walk immediately.
19. Some sort of accident or illness will lead to amnesia. Typically it’s selective, often it will be forgetting the person the amnesiac is in love with, and usually it will resolve itself when something dramatic happens.
20. Most of the time, someone will have cancer or some other terminal illness.
21. If you’re saving someone from being hit by a car, you will push them out of the way and then wait for the car to hit you.