You've seen movies and TV shows about medicine, law and boxing — but how accurate are they?

As a writer, one of my favourite pastimes is respectfully cornering someone from an industry vastly different from mine and asking them questions about their lifestyle. I love listening to people open up about doing everything from garbage collection to funeral direction.

I spent an entire flight to San Salvador speaking my broken Spanish to a man who told me HVAC saved his life. He was able to immigrate to Canada and put his three children through university despite not speaking English because all he needed were his tools and know-how. At a fashion event, I put my hand on the shoulder of a bodyguard who cried as he told me how much he wanted to get out of the celebrity security business. It was much too traumatic signing non-disclosure agreements to protect his celebrity clients as they engaged in immoral activities, all under his watch.

I love listening to people open up about doing everything from garbage collection to funeral direction.- Catherine Hernandez, writer

My curiosity isn't stopping anytime soon — in fact, I feel it has grown and shifted. Instead of just grilling folks about their professions, I've assembled this generous group of experts in three different industries to tell us exactly how the media fails in depicting them.

Medicine

Let's start with medicine. Thanks to television shows like Grey's Anatomy, we are bombarded with notions of medical students in supply closets stripping their scrubs for a quickie between treating one patient with a brain tumour and another patient who has escaped a burning building. It would be a wee bit alarming to be treated in such a hospital, what with all the violent quarrels between staff in the hallways. And would anyone have faith in a doctor who spends his free time staring off into the vista outside the hospital pondering his constant failure? I had to ask my fellow Toronto Book Award shortlister, James Maskalyk, if medical dramas are indeed a load of hooey. His book, Life on the Ground Floor, won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for non-fiction for his stunning storytelling around his experiences as an emergency physician in both Toronto and Addis Ababa.

"Medicine is the same as any other job," he says. "There are moments of excitement and there are moments of relevance and then there are moments of boredom. There's a difference between dealing with a gunshot wound and the common cold. We deal with the common cold 50 times more than the gunshot wounds, but if you're watching a medical drama on television of course all you see is tragedy and romance. You get this outside view of medicine being full of diagnostic dilemma and pregnant with issues of life and death."

According to James, life in an ER is often filled with asking a colleague to cover you while you are getting a coffee, assuaging fears and seeking sincere human connection with his patients. What frustrates him the most is the lack of verisimilitude in television shows when depicting a patient's vital signs. Writers could easily pay experts like James to fact-check for accuracy. Oh, and that entire soap opera, love triangle aspect of medical dramas? James laughs it off. "I spend most of my time reassuring people, not making out with a nurse in the broom closet. If it is happening, it's never me and it never was."

Boxing

Then, I turned to 11-time National Champion Mandy Bujold to set the record straight about the world of boxing. I love the usual trajectory of each storyline of boxing films: street-involved kid rises to the glitz and glam of the big leagues. He forgets to stay true to himself, gets taken advantage of by someone he thought he trusted and finds himself at square one. He ends up in some low-rent gym where he is taken under the wing of an eccentric trainer with a chip on his shoulder. The guy rises to the top yet again, only this time, he is armed with something greater than his left and right hand: his integrity. Is any of this real?

"It's funny when people always bring it up. They say, 'You must have loved Million Dollar Baby.' It's not that the storyline wasn't any good — it's just that watching boxing in a movie makes me cringe." Well, that settles it.

Mandy's main pet peeve about the media's portrayal of boxing is that it's never about skill nor strategy — it's about watching the main character get bloody and bruised. While audiences may assume boxers spend weeks after a fight nursing disconnected eyelids and blue jawbones, Mandy reassured me that this rarely happens. In her 150 fights, she has only suffered three black eyes. In Olympic-style fights, there are a limited amount of punches a boxer can withstand before a referee needs to stop a fight. In the pros, fighters withstand more punches, but certainly not as many as we see in the movies.

It's funny when people always bring it up. They say, 'You must have loved Million Dollar Baby.' It's not that the storyline wasn't any good — it's just that watching boxing in a movie makes me cringe.- Mandy Bujold, Olympic boxer

"In boxing, you're more prepared. You learn defence. You have to be more creative. What may seem boring in real-life boxing is actually an amazing art; it's not just about throwing punches." Since boxing films are obsessed with the narrative of the comeback kid, they fail to address the fact that athletes choose boxing for a myriad of reasons from cross-fitness to the industry's openness to all body types. And that cliché quick training montage? It's a complete joke. It took Mandy one year of training before she could compete the first time, and it took her 13 years before she competed in the Olympics. That would be one long montage.

Law

Now onto law. Perhaps it's the power suits or the stumble-free monologues, but I've always been fascinated by legal dramas. I knew this heightened reality was most likely authored by creative screenwriters. But I had to ask refugee and immigration lawyer El Farouk Khaki what the deal was.

"I got turned off of How to Get Away with Murder. It's the intrigue, the dishonesty. It's just dirty," El Farouk says with a bitter laugh. "It's been a while since I was in law school, but it wasn't like that. Television creates a mythology. I don't think a lot of those mythologies are necessarily grounded in fact. Lawyers are also a profession that a lot of people criticize...But I know a lot of ethical and moral people in the areas of law that I practice."

While there are lawyers in high-end firms, El Farouk laments that there aren't more depictions of lower-paid professionals such as himself who work hard for the safety of newcomers and refugees while sharing staff, resources and working from home.

"This is similar to the conversation that I often have about Muslim depictions in the media," says El Farouk, who is also a renowned human rights activist with a focus on fighting Islamophobia. "99% of the time, they will show a Muslim praying."

"And I will tell you that when they do that, 99% of the time, they are getting something wrong."