"Grey's Anatomy" has aired 12 episodes so far this season, and a nurses group doesn't like half of them.

The show tops the Center for Nursing Advocacy and the American Journal of Nursing's annual list of the worst media portrayals of nurses. The center said the show "makes a point of attacking the profession" of nurses and makes them look like "fawning or bitter losers with no significant role in hospital care."

Five episodes of "House" ranked second on the worst list, and episodes of "Scrubs" and "Six Feet Under" also made the list. Three episodes of "ER" made the worst list, while two other episodes made the best list.

Sandy Summers, the center's executive director, said the shows on the worst list "portrayed nurses as mute servants, while heroic physicians provided all important care -- much of which nurses do in real life. Worse yet, the physician characters made vicious anti-nurse slurs that were never rebutted."

In a news release, Summers said that "Grey's Anatomy" had positive physician characters indignantly deliver lines such as: "Did you just call me a nurse?" and "You're the pig who called Meredith a nurse ... I hate you on principle."

Summers also noted that the physician characters on "House" consider nurses to be unskilled "nurse-maids" who are good for handling stool and patients who have fallen down. In one scene, she said, the lead physician summoned nurses for the latter task by calling out, "cleanup on aisle three!"

"Most of the best depictions of nursing appeared in the print press," said Summers, who cited work by journalist Suzanne Gordon and the Boston Globe as exceptional.

Summers also praised the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for changing the name of its annual minority health campaign from "Take a Loved One to the Doctor Day" to "Take a Loved One for a Checkup Day" as not to exclude nurses.