What do medical dramas use for organs in surgery scenes?

Watching characters perform surgeries on your favorite TV medical dramas, you may wonder what shows they use to create fake organs, and the answer is just as crude as you feared.

“It's usually something synthetic that the art department made. At first we used parts of perhaps a pig or a chicken to replicate [a human] organ,” Grey's Anatomy star James Pickens. Jr.who has played Dr. Richard Webber, Chief of Surgery at Gray Sloan Memorial Hospital since the show's premiere in 2005, shares exclusively in the latest issue of Us weekly.

Pickens added that, as you'd expect, there's also plenty of fake blood available throughout to help make the surgical moments feel more authentic. “Gallons!” He tells us laughing. “We have enough fake blood to last us until the cows come home!”

But what about the safety of the actors during those intense moments in the operating room? Pickens says most of the surgical instruments are real, but precautions are definitely taken. “Most of them (the pills, the tweezers, the Bovie) are real,” he explained. But obviously with scalpels, for safety reasons, they will use a dull blade.”

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Normally, lady doctors… Grey's Anatomy, Chicago Med, New Amsterdam either The residentto name a few, they focus on telling the most unexpected and, yes, sometimes outlandish, stories possible to keep the drama alive. However, that doesn't mean they stop investigating.

When Dr. Arizona Robbins (Jessica Capshaw) returned to Grey's Anatomy for season 20 last year, the show's medical advisor, Michael MetznerI wanted her to come back with an innovative procedure that could show how magical the operating room can be.

In the episode “Baby, Can I Hold You”, Arizona performs the first Galen surgery on the uterine vein on a fetus, with the help of Dr. Jo Wilson (Camila Luddington) and Dr. Amelia Shepherd (Caterina Scorsene). The vein of Galen is a blood vessel that can malfunction and cause heart and lung problems, according to the Boston Children's Hospital. If a baby does not receive surgery in time, the effects can be fatal.

The story was inspired by a real-life doctor. Darren Orbachwho helped develop the technique of operating on a fetus in the womb. Metzner said the series hired Orbach “as a consultant and interviewed him many times” to make sure all the details were as accurate as possible.

“It is something very controversial. It's still in its experimental stage, so there are many fetal surgeons who advocate against doing something like this because of its history. But now there are cases in small numbers that have been successful,” Metzner said. Shondaland.com in April, adding: “We also have a researcher who has no medical training but is always searching the headlines for new and interesting things that are happening within medicine. So, it’s a team effort.”

Metzner recalled calling Dr. Orbach for the episode and asking him to “know every needle and every piece of equipment, in the detail he used.” Metzner said production then “actually reached out to those companies” and purchased the “specific things” the doctor would use.

“Then I worked with our video rendering person to cut the visual representations of the surgery to match the scenes of the story we were trying to tell,” he continued. “I worked with the actors and the director to imitate what happens in the surgery footage with their hands and with the real team to marry them.”

Metzner is the only doctor who is in the writers' room daily and works with the actors and directors. He is also involved in post-production, meaning he can oversee the plot from start to finish. Metzner added that occasionally, especially for procedures that are still in experimental stages, Grey's often uses real images of patients in scenes to maintain authenticity.

“When a surgery has been done only a few times, that's the only thing we can use,” he said. “We have done it in the past. Some of the images from our partial heart transplant last season were from [a real] EITHER.”

For more information on the inner workings of the entertainment industry, check out the latest issue of Us Weekly, on newsstands now.