Anyone watch House? Are the episodes based on real cases? What about that doctor, are there real, living doctors like him? In short, is there any shred of this show that is the slightest bit real?
Ok that’s all
Ficer67
There’s a great website called Polite Dissent which is written by an actual doctor and reviews the medicine in each episode. Like all TV shows, it’s pretty unrealistic, but the stuff on House is often pretty egregious.
A couple of MDs I’ve met say the most realistic medical show they’ve ever seen is Scrubs. FWIW.
The cases on House are almost entirely made up, but there was one B-story that was a rip-off of one of Oliver Sacks’ cases – about a woman who had dormant syphilis for decades and it tweaked her brain and made her happy and charming. I believe Sacks describes that one in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, one of my favorite books.
I read a book about the series. It says most of the things that happen in the show are Could Happen events, or Has Happened Once or Has Happened Extremely Rarely. But those are the types of cases that fit in with House’s personality, job profile, and job skills - he gets the oddball cases.
They got one where they are drilling into someone’s thigh bone, but the drill bit couldn’t get through - the bone had hardened harder than the drill bit due to a bizarro condition. The book I read said it has happened a couple of times ever in history, but is amazingly rare.
This was an article in New Scientist about a doctor called William Gahl, who’s supposedly the ‘real life House’ in that he solves cases no one else can figure out. Obviously there’s a fair bit of difference though because the House character can be very unrealistic at times, constantly breaking hospital rules and laws without many repercussions…
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026862.900-meet-dr-houses-caring-alter-ego-.html
So the work they do is similar but they way they go about it is very different - the article also mentions that Gahl will spend days trawling through every word and lab result in a stack of files to get clues as to a patient’s condition, something I can’t imagine House doing!
Also, the lady that compulsively scratched through her skull and exposed her brain is based on a true case (the outcome, details, etc were not the same, just the fact that she scratched through her skull unintentionally)
The thing is most doctors have boring routine cases. I mean I go to my doctor once a year and it’s the same thing, old people complaining about being old, kids running noses and such.
Who wants to watch a TV show about that? That is why they take off beat cases and make a story out of it.
The closest I can recall to a real case that would be similar to TV, was in a hospital in Humboldt Park, they had a black man and no one knew what was wrong with him. And he got very ill. Finally someone said, someone said “You talk with an accent, where are you from.” He said Nigeria. They asked him if he had been their recently, he said, “yes.” Then the pretty much immeidately diagnosed him with Lassa Fever.
Who’d think anyone in a Chicago Hospital would have something as exotic as Lassa Fever (at least in this country it is, it’s endemic in West Africa).
So you see that kind of thing, that is interesting rarely happens. Most doctors have routine cases day in and day out.
What about the part where he sends his minions to break into people’s houses and investigate? Also BS?
Are you sure this case happened? If so that’s appalling. I’d have thought one of the very first things the doctors would do in that situation is find out where the patient had travelled recently. The idea that they could let someone get ‘very ill’ - with symptoms that are quickly identifiable as being Lassa fever - before thinking to ask if they’d been to Africa is shocking (let alone when it’s a black man talking with an African accent!).
There was a “mistaken identity” episode which had some similarities to this real life story:
I was working on my library yesterday and I found the book to which I had referred earlier, “The Medical Science of House, M.D.,” by Andrew Holtz.
He doesn’t just talk about the show, he talks about the real-life applications of some of that medicine. It starts with how someone seeks diagnosis for symptoms, and how the doctor performs a diagnosis.
By the way, I find a lot of what textbooks, books, and various official media suggest a doctor’s visit should be is rarely, rarely the case. In my personal experience and those of many people I’ve spoken with, the care actually received is atrocious - but they don’t want to show that kind of stuff when they portray our doctors.
In the book, he compares what “should” happen in a doctor’s office to what you see on House. He talks about how they run tests on House compared to IRL. IRL it takes days or weeks for some tests to come back, and a lot of medicine is “wait and see,” with waiting being long periods of time. That doesn’t make for good TV, so they speed things up. Tests that can take days or weeks now take hours in the show. Approvals for things that might take days are done in minutes or skipped altogether.
They talk about the whiteboard, and how a Differential Diagnosis is something performed only in some situations.
The book also discusses his bedside manner and his ethics, and how he often makes decisions on his own against what others suggest or think is best.
The book discusses particular episodes, things House does, and what a real hospital would do in response. Giving a patient a shot of alcohol to shrink the tumor so he could get a surgeon to operate would probably get him removed, tenure or no.
It does list the whole thing about searching homes of patients without permission on a “short” list of things he does that violate rules, along with lying to patients and coworkers, verbally abusing and striking patients and coworkers, violating DNR instructions, giving care to patients with immune disorders, running tests without permission, etc.
If you’re truly interested, I recommend the read.
In assessing the question about whether there are Real Life physicians like Gregory House, MD, I would refer you to this excerpt from a most excellent resource:
FWIW, I’ve read that “House” is basically an homage to Sherlock Holmes (early reviews of the series referred to it as “Sherlock Holmes in a hospital”, IIRC), and Holmes was known to be a bit cold blooded at times (see, e.g., the conversation in A Study in Scarlet between Stamford and Dr. Watson where Stamford puts the idea in Watson’s head to room with Holmes). I suspect that a lot of House’s misbehavior is basically Sherlock Holmes turned up to 12 or 13, let alone 11.
Cheers,
bcg