Aphasia on TV!

I don’t usually watch Grey’s Anatomy, but when I heard a recent episode showed a patient with aphasia, I just had to go searching for the clip. If you didn’t catch it, there’s a link to the file here, from www.greys-media.com.

My first thought after watching it (aside from remembering why I usually dislike doing language evals with family present) was, somebody give the man a cue! Semantic, phonemic, pick a cue, any cue! (Of course, if he were my patient, we’d go through the whole hierarchy. “You drink from it. What do you drink from? You drink from a ___. You drink from a /k/___. You drink from a cup.”)

My next thought was, he’s pretty fluent to have such significant confrontation naming deficits. Probably anomic aphasia, although without testing repetition, you can’t rule out conduction aphasia. Hmm. Must not be getting enough language evals at work recently, that I feel the need to diagnose TV characters. :)