Tribute to brilliant medical ‘warriors’

One of the most compelling show titles on the TV programming spectrum is “Monsters Inside Me.” With a title like that, how can viewers not avoid watching the show—at least once?

The title conjures up horrifying images of “alien-like” critters growing at our insides, or abnormally developed “twin” growths or incubi that gift otherwise normal people with an additional appendage, organ or even half-formed sibling!

On point of fact, however, “Monsters Inside Me” interests itself in far smaller and less physically horrific internal interlopers, like parasites that infect their unwilling human hosts’ bodies with rare and deadly illnesses.

The gravity of the onslaught is aggravated by the fact that the parasites are so tiny that their victims don’t even know they’ve been attacked—until the symptoms worsen and they end up almost too sick to revive.

Even medical specialists are occasionally stumped and foiled by the pernicious invisibility of the enemy, and thus are challenged to sometimes go to extreme lengths to finally identify rare illnesses in time to save their patients’ lives.

That’s a chilling prospect, to be sure—but most of the time, the show opts to end on a more positive note, with brilliant medical investigators and “warriors” managing to do the “impossible.”

Even better, the arduous diagnostic and healing process is chronicled in involving and clarifying detail, so that viewers know what to do when similar symptoms strike members of their own families, especially their vulnerable and defenseless children.

Despite this clearly cautionary and educational bent, the show has occasionally been rapped for arousing too much fear in young viewers, who sometimes get so spooked about the invisible “dangers out there” that they no longer venture outside of the controlled environments of their homes and schools.

In general, however, “Monsters Inside Me” has been cited for making medical science more comprehensible to laymen.

Its focus on prevention is another plus, as well as the believable presentation of its dramatizations and reenactments.

Unlike other shows that make use of cheap and inept actors, the players here are generally natural and involving.

The dramatizations are seamlessly edited into shots of the actual patients and victims themselves, so the entire clinical feature comes through as more of an organic whole.