dunno if I would want Foreman to be my doctor…
- He poked her in the foot and caused rectal bleeding
- He shoved a tube up her but and caused a nose bleed.
Clearly he doesn’t know his own strength!
Obviously, the doctor to have is Wilson. With regards to the ethics, House doesn’t care, Cameron is whiney and Foreman is an ambitious prick. Wilson at least know that there are practical reasons for considering ethics. Your department doesn’t run right when everybody is fighting. Not that this argument is likely to convince House.
My wife thinks they’re setting up Cuddy to be more of a mentor for Cameron.
The same Wilson who in the 1st season acted as a Mole for the new administrator to undermine his boss? None of these people are the pillars of virtue we’d expect. That’s why I love this show so much. The format would have worn on me long ago had it not been for the interesting characters and interesting moral and ethical dilemmas. I will of course ignore the fact that the overall Moral of the entire series is LIES ARE BAD M’kay.
10 things I learned from House M.D.
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The system is in place to stop normal people from doing stupid things, not for smart people to do stupid things at the right time.
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Munchausen’s is a good bet in many cases.
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People lie. They always lie. They never tell the truth. Except when they do.
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Your ex-wife will take you back, eventually, so long as you drug her new husband and make her realize that you can change.
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The men’s urinal is great for meetings.
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If you’re always right, you’d better continue that streak.
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Just because you gave the hospital more money than Croesus, doesn’t mean you can stop the unstoppable force of a genius on a mission.
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Masturbation is sex with someone you love.
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Ethics are more like guidelines than rules really.
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Lies are bad. Especially to your doctor. Especially when your doctor has you because no one else knows what’s even wrong with you.
Maybe my take on the ethics issue is simplistic. This episode tried to make the issue of the sick gal’s intention of breaking up with the healthy one a reason that the healthy one had to be informed of those intentions before allowing her to donate part of her organ to the sick one. Cameron’s taking of that side of the argument and pushing it as a case of ethics was demonstrated to be hollow when it was revealed that the real ethical issue was whether the sick gal would have to drop her notion of ditching the healthy one now that the healthy one had donated her organ to keep the sick one alive.
As I read this scenario it’s a matter of one version of greed conflicting with another. The medical aspect of it all was handled neatly when the healthy gal insisted her organ be used. The medical establishment was thereby freed from any malpractice implications that an unbiased judge or jury would be prone to award if the case went to trial. Your basic frivolous lawsuit material.
As far as the moral lesson goes, Cameron jumped the gun on taking sides and was shown to be foolish for doing so. If she were indeed ethical in the matter she would have investigated further into the motives of the healthy one. After all, the healthy one was not encumbered by being unconscious or in pain over 90% of the hospital stay.
The arc of the episode reminded me of so many of those stories where the audience is essentially forced to take sides with the “weak” character only to learn in the process of the reveal of The Sting that the “weak” one was a conniving asshole. Edward Norton’s supreme acting in that Richard Gere piece Primal Fear is the best example I can name. The fact that Norton was a basic unknown at the time and was so convincing in his weakness only added to the letdown the audience had to feel when it was shown how manipulative and evil the character had been. I’m not awarding this House episode with the high marks that Primal Fear got, but it’s mostly because the idea isn’t as fresh nowadays. It still works as a twist even in less ambitious projects.
Just helps to make a case for not being so quick to judge motives and intentions. Ethics, at best, is a gray area, I will continue to believe.
Definitely – particularly since Cameron was on about how Foreman “stole” her paper, when it was pretty clear that (although they centered around the same case) the subjects were different. Foreman’s paper focused on diagnostics and medicine, while Cameron’s was more of an editorial, concerned with the ethics of the case. Even if Foreman was published in the AJMS or summat, there’s no reason Cameron couldn’t still submit her work to the Kennedy Institute Journal of Ethics.
This is in the context of the show, of course – where House is basically the medical analog of Dirty Harry, given license (by the writers and the audience) to let the ends justify the means. In the real world, we’d sympathize with his squeaky wheel colleagues and superiors wringing their hands about torturing citizens and blatantly disregarding the fourth amendment, but in the context of the show we’re confident that the hero is infallible and that the ends do justify the means, so we sit there hoping they get served a cup of STFU.
Hmmm, maybe Jack Bauer would have been a more timely analogy. 
You and a coworker are hired on the same day in 2002, and work in the same unit. You feel that you’re a bit better than your coworker at doing the job. A great position opens up. Your coworker tells you they’re going to interview for the position. Are you required to tell them that you’ll be interviewing also?
Not the same situation. Hell, if your coworker is telling you they’re interviewing people for a job, he’d be pretty dumb not to assume you wouldn’t try for the job.
Cameron, OTOH, had no reason to believe that Foreman was writing up the same case. Since he knew she was, it was underhanded not to tell her. Not good for a working relationship, and definitely a character trait that will get you in trouble down the line.
See, i don’t get that… it isnt a competition… they could have each submitted thier articles.
The point was that while Cameron was waiting for House’s sign off (‘aproval’), Foreman submitted, thereby getting published ‘first’… now if there is a rule that only one article about a case can be published, that’s a little different… but in no way did Foreman getting published ‘first’ have any reflection on Cameron’s paper.
What this shows is that while Cameron needs the pat on the back “go ahead”, Foreman is willing to move forward without it…
In trouble with who? Not anybody in this hospital, that’s for sure. The biggest complaint I saw was from Wilson, chiding House because the situation created conflict on the team. Nobody has said boo to Foreman, and I doubt anyone there cares that Cameron felt wronged.
You missed the “down the line” part. Doctors who do whatever the hell they feel like doing because they can eventually end up stepping over the line in one way or another. Witness the recent idiocy of the surgeon in Oakland who showed up for surgery for intoxicated, but refused to submit to a breathalizer test. The DA dropped charges (story), but according to an earlier story, this isn’t the first time that doctor has shown up to work after having a few. It isn’t about someone’s feelings getting hurt. It’s about doing the right thing for your patients. If you’re so unethical that you’d steal from a colleague to get ahead, what are you willing to do to your patients for the same reason? I won’t work for doctors like that.
No, you’re thinking of Chase, who’s pretty much always been shown to be an amoral suckup (albeit a good doctor with a track record second only to House for being correct on off-the-wall diagnoses).
I can’t recall Wilson ever being anything but ethical in his professional life on the show (at least so far).
The question is… is this Foreman’s normal mode, or is he just adapting to the circumstance of working with House? I think he’s adapting, and Cameron isn’t. Give Foreman a different boss, he’ll learn to work within that system. Cameron is still trying to force fit her ethics on House’s team.
My mistake… I was thinking Chase. Don’t know where my mind went there.
Wilson seems a decent guy, though he did cheat on his wife… a lot according to conversations he’s had with House.
I doubt that would effect his treatment of you… but he is also by the book. How many times has he told House “you can’t do that” In that show it means if he were to treat you you’d likely end up dead unless House coerced him to do what he normally wouldn’t.
I’ll take the uncaring Jerk Gregory House. Only because unless I’m a walk in patient I’ll likely never see him and won’t have to deal with his rudeness, unless I’m on death’s door, but at least when do see him I’ll know I’ve got a 85% chance of survival 15 minutes after meeting him.
Everyone in this thread seems to be forgetting the fact that Foreman did get House’s approval on his article; early in the show there’s a conversation where House says he signed off on Foreman’s article, but that he didn’t actually read it. Cameron’s article just got buried.
House later says he didn’t read Foreman’s article either, Foreman just bugged him and House eventually lied to him.
Wilson may be a great doctor and very ethical (as far as medicine is concerned) however I wouldn’t want him for my doctor because he’s an oncologist and that would mean I have cancer.*
Heck, I don’t think I’d want any of them for my doctor since that would mean I have some weird freaky ass disease and if the manage to figure it out before I die I may still end up needing a new organ or two.
- and also because he’s not real.
Well, I have had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (8 years in remission), so in the House universe Wilson would be my doctor. And if anything freaky happened to me, my doctor has access to House, so I’m covered.
Plus, Wilson will roll my joints for me. 
Not necessarily. He does clinic duty, too.
I may be a bit late to the party, but I have to agree that this episode was about how ethics has no meaning. Not only in the main story, but also in the Cameron/Foreman one. Ethics, ultimately, is in the eye of the beholder. Is House unethical for withholding information from Max, even though it may save plague woman’s life? Who is more ethical? The woman who wasn’t going to tell her partner, who was giving her liver, she was going to leave her (until shamed by Cameron… and who knew if she’d go through with it), or the woman who knew but wanted to guilt the sick woman into staying with her?
Ethics is murky, not clear. Hell, the character of House has basically been showing this view for a season and a half. Maybe Foreman is right… most of the people in the hospital seemed not to think he did anything wrong (he was just smarter about it).