# Anyone watch House? Are the episodes based on real cases? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 8, 2009, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-watch-house-are-the-episodes-based-on-real-cases/488706 "2009-03-08T03:58:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Ficer67](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/c57346/32.png) [@Ficer67](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ficer67)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2009, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-watch-house-are-the-episodes-based-on-real-cases/488706/1 "2009-03-08T03:58:56Z")
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 ---
**Author:** ![friedo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8edcca/32.png) [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2009, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-watch-house-are-the-episodes-based-on-real-cases/488706/2 "2009-03-08T05:13:19Z")
There’s a great website called [Polite Dissent](http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html) 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. ---
**Author:** ![SeanArenas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/df705f/32.png) [@SeanArenas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SeanArenas)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2009, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-watch-house-are-the-episodes-based-on-real-cases/488706/3 "2009-03-08T05:16:14Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Great\_Philosopher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3ec8ea/32.png) [@The\_Great\_Philosopher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Great_Philosopher)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2009, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-watch-house-are-the-episodes-based-on-real-cases/488706/4 "2009-03-08T18:03:57Z")
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](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026862.900-meet-dr-houses-caring-alter-ego-.html) ---
**Author:** ![The\_Great\_Philosopher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3ec8ea/32.png) [@The\_Great\_Philosopher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Great_Philosopher)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2009, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-watch-house-are-the-episodes-based-on-real-cases/488706/5 "2009-03-08T18:09:23Z")
> [@](#): > > Both [House and William Gahl] see patients with baffling symptoms - but the parallels end there. Real-life medical mysteries tend to be chronic disorders that unfold over months or years, rather than the emergency situations that make for compelling TV drama. > > “House sees these people who’ve basically come in through the door and collapsed,” Gahl says. By contrast, the patients he investigates usually have slowly developing or reasonably stable conditions that match no known disease. So it’s not like a typical House episode, with doctors reaching for the defibrillator paddles to revive a patient in cardiac arrest? “No. I don’t want to bring a patient here who is that sick.” > > … > > The interviews with patients yield better information than you might think from watching the TV House, whose mantra - “Everybody lies” - reflects his patients’ tendency to hide shameful facts that are crucial to their diagnoses. “If anything, they do the opposite,” says Gahl. “They tell you about all sorts of things that are completely irrelevant.” > > … > > Take the Bourhills, a couple from New Jersey who are desperate to know what is wrong with their 3-year-old daughter Paige. After a long day of medical tests, Dave and Annette Bourhill tell me Paige’s story as she sleeps in her mother’s arms. > > Paige appeared to be fine up until 10 months, when she had a seizure and was found to have lesions in her brain. Now she cannot hold her head straight, and has poor control over her movements. Is it a metabolic disease? Or a problem triggered by the fever she had before the initial seizure? Numerous specialists have failed to come up with an answer, leaving the family in limbo. “We don’t know what’s going to happen,” says Annette. > > Near the end of our conversation, Gahl drops by. He wants to review some old family videos, and needs a hair sample from Paige. Gahl is respectful and reassuring - and concerned at Paige’s distress at being woken. He too has yet to find a clear answer to the questions about her condition, but the Bourhills are delighted with his approach to the case. “He said that he was honoured that we turned to them for help,” Dave tells me later. > > Now that’s something you definitely don’t see on TV. Gahl is, if anything, the Anti-House. 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! ---
**Author:** ![Hello\_Again](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/85e7bf/32.png) [@Hello\_Again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hello_Again)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2009, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-watch-house-are-the-episodes-based-on-real-cases/488706/6 "2009-03-08T18:24:43Z")
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) ---
**Author:** ![Markxxx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5daacb/32.png) [@Markxxx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Markxxx)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2009, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-watch-house-are-the-episodes-based-on-real-cases/488706/7 "2009-03-09T01:22:48Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Freudian\_Slit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@Freudian\_Slit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freudian_Slit)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2009, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-watch-house-are-the-episodes-based-on-real-cases/488706/8 "2009-03-09T01:28:35Z")
What about the part where he sends his minions to break into people’s houses and investigate? Also BS? ---
**Author:** ![The\_Great\_Philosopher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3ec8ea/32.png) [@The\_Great\_Philosopher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Great_Philosopher)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2009, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-watch-house-are-the-episodes-based-on-real-cases/488706/9 "2009-03-09T03:14:31Z")
> [@Markxxx](#): > > 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. 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!). ---
**Author:** ![Nicest\_of\_the\_Damned](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/8baadc/32.png) [@Nicest\_of\_the\_Damned](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nicest_of_the_Damned)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2009, 7:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-watch-house-are-the-episodes-based-on-real-cases/488706/10 "2009-03-09T07:19:35Z")
There was a “mistaken identity” episode which had some similarities to this real life story: [http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,197694,00.html](http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,197694,00.html) > [@](#): > > CALEDONIA, Mich. — A couple sat by their daughter’s hospital bedside for weeks after an auto accident until she came out of a coma and they realized she was not their daughter after all, but another blond-haired young woman injured in the wreck. ---
**Author:** ![SeanArenas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/df705f/32.png) [@SeanArenas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SeanArenas)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2009, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-watch-house-are-the-episodes-based-on-real-cases/488706/11 "2009-03-09T15:02:46Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Bluffcityguy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ebca7d/32.png) [@Bluffcityguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bluffcityguy)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2009, 3:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-watch-house-are-the-episodes-based-on-real-cases/488706/12 "2009-03-09T15:27:56Z")
> [@Ficer67](#): > > Anyone watch House? Are the episodes based on real cases? What about that doctor, are there real, living doctors like him? 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: > [@](#): > > Of particular note is the commitment of writers to the Dr Jerk concept, as Dr. House behaves far worse than his counterparts on other series: any real doctor who behaved this way would be immediately fired, jailed, beaten and/or chased by villagers with torches and pitchforks. He has shot a corpse in the head, broken a patient’s fingers as a means of torture, got an ailing patient drunk, sliced open a patient without anesthesia, subverted and obstructed the law at every opportunity, forged medical records of cancer in order to apply for prescription narcotics, stolen drugs from a dead man, stolen drugs from a living man, is constantly bullying his boss, and killed a baby in an illegal medical experiment–although in most cases he had excellent medical reasons for doing so. > –[Television Tropes & Idioms wiki, article “House”](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/House) 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