Assume for the sake of argument that patients with undiagnosed, life-threatening symptoms do have a significantly higher survival chance when Dr. House is on the case, what would you do with this talent?
Isn’t the goal of a teaching hospital to widely disseminate such world-changing benefits? Beyond simply publishing papers, how could world-famous Doctor Greg House exploit his gift beyond his ineffectual “training” of a small cadre of doctors, who mostly end up moving on to other careers that do not reproduce his unique skills? Or would that make Dr. House less special if he shared his skills more effectively?
If you were the administrator of PPTH, what changes would you make?
Pepper Mill grew up near there, and she loves House, but she’s frustrated by the hospital – it ain’t Princeton Hospital. She says the long ashots of the building are the Chemistry Building at Princeton. (The real hospital is a LOT smaller than the one they show on TV).
She says House ought to be covering a LOT more patients than the one he seems to spend time on each week.
Don’t know how to say we’d change it, except it’s apparently not very realistic. I read an article somewhere that took quite a lot of umbrage at House’s solutions, and I think the OP’s assessment of the problem is spot-on.
House should be lecturing on Principles of Diagnostic Medicine in med school and accompanying interns on rounds whenever a patientr with odd symptoms shows up.
Given the lawsuit potential of those two situations, however (not by patients, but by the students and staff) it’s much better to have him only in contact with a handful of residents who presumably already know his reputation and a self-selected small group of patients who would otherwise be dead.
I loveHouse, but were I an administrator at PPTH, I’d see to it that he would be stuck in a classroom for the rest of his life. Hospitals don’t care how many lives they save as much as the number of medical advancements they can boast discovering. Furthermore, it’s unrealistic that every patient is so glad to be alive that they don’t care what unethical methods the doctor used to arrive at their cure. Dr. House and the PPTH would be a supermagnet for lawsuits. Why settle for being cured when you can be cured and be rich?
PPTH in the series seems rather small and boutique-y and unless it’s the recipient of massive endowments I can’t see how it could stay in business, maintain a legal warchest, and stay current technology-wise sufficient to endure a guy like House. Unfortunately for House, I’d have to exploit his Key Opinion Leader status to bring in clinical research dollars from the government and pharmaceuticals. I’d also have to bring in crack financial and PR teams to cobble together compensation packages from the various entities established by them, and to keep PPTH in the front of people’s minds through proper exploitation. Lots of TV time (“ABC Evening news reports on progress being made in the battle against Fulminating Osteomyelitis”) and maybe even bumperstickers available to donors with something like “I said PPTH!! to Primary Amoebic Meningoencephalitis!”.
I would make sure as many random people I could find would wander in and out of House’s area spouting random shit or reading from random books in hopes that it would make him think up the solution to some undiagnosable problem.
House’s particular genius would go nowhere in a classroom setting. His curriculum would be, roughly:
1.) Know your diseases, drug interactions, and disease-disease interactions. All of them.
2.) Learn how to test for everything.
3.) Group work, brainstorming, and the process of elimination.
3.) Brilliant flashes of insight. Wait. You can’t teach that.
He’s very much a spontaneous, applied problem-solver, but not a teacher. I imagine he’d be bored and lazy, and his students would would be completely bewildered. As much as I drool over the man, I wouldn’t take one of his classes.
Of course, I imagine he’s quite efficient in the clinic, when he bothers and the patient doesn’t annoy him. (Yeah, yeah, I know–but not EVERYONE annoys him. We just only get to see the egregious ones, because thsoe are also the stupid ones.)
One of the things that’s made this past season suck so much is we hardly ever see House on clinic duty. In the past seasons, some clinic dolt would often end up inspiring House’s fifth-act epiphany in an amusing way.
I’m going to have to start watching this show. I used to live on Harrison Street by US 1, and both my kids were born in the Medical Center at Princeton (not Princeton Hospital) on Witherspoon Street. I understood it moved, though.
Which would probably be just the way he likes it. He’d probably go out of his way to make sure any Required Texts for his classes were mysteriously unavailable.
House is put up with because he is brilliant. Like many people in that category, he can’t relate to others well and in his specific case hates most people anyway. House would be allowed to do as he pleases though. He figures out cases that would be fatal to just about any other doctor, and often makes breakthroughs that are unique. I’d make any patient coming in understand that he uses unorthodox, sometimes experimental treatments and that by placing themselves in his care they waive the right to the usual lawsuit availability. If they don’t like it they can go to another doctor in the hospital. House’s genius is worth enabling, as far as I’m concerned. I would treat his staff in the same manner, Letting them know that they are trading off many of the usual expectations and protections of a work environment to benefit from working with one of the top people in the world. Basically, I’d cut a deal with him that is acceptable to him. Tv? Sure. Need Vicadin? So long as you aren’t over the limit of what is safe? No problem. Run your tests. Use the damn MRI, just produce results.