While watching House on Monday something occurred to me. On house the team gets a patient and sticks with them until the patient either gets well, or dies.
But in any hospital I’ve been in, and all the times I’ve seen real life hospitals on TV, doctors have multiple patients at a time.
So is House unrealistic this way, or are their hospitals where one doctor (or a team) only work with one patient at a time?
Yes, House is unrealistic - in more ways than mentioned.
No, there are not hospitals where a doctor only has one patient at a time until they are cured. There may be private doctors that do this, but they are not likely the type to have Hospital jobs.
Of course House is unrealistic. On the other hand you never see them go to the bathroom, eat food, go to the grocery, sleep, etc. etc. There is a built in assumption that other things are going on that aren’t being shown during the episode. Why can’t the uninteresting patients that house also deals with, be one of the things that aren’t shown?
I know that it is unrealistic in a lot of ways, but I just wanted to focus on this particular aspect.
As for seeing other patients, it’s pretty obvious they only have the one. While at work, they either focus on they patient they have, or their personal lives.
Anyway, it looks like my GQ question was answered. Thank you.
Not true - there was an entire episode about House going to the bathroom, or rather his inability to do so.
The idea behind House is that that hospital has a special “Department of Diagnostic Medicine” that they set up for House, that only gets cases that he chooses; cases that normal doctors can’t figure out.
So, even though it’s not realistic that you’d find a real hospital working that way, that’s the in show reason Dr. House is allowed to only deal with one patient at a time.
Thank you for the explanation.
There have been episodes showing House putting in hours at the clinic, so I think it is fair to say that the patient of the week isn’t the only thing filling his time.
Also, in the show House, he does have to spend some time in various clinical duties, usually as a form of punishment for him, where he gets to deal with mundane and ordinary patients. So, though House may seem like he’s only got one patient, for at least 2-3 of the seasons, he’s had to deal with not only his patient, but he’s been a physician doing rounds in the clinic. They could simply have not focused on those aspects except to do the occasionally wierd patient stupidity gag, or when it served the storyline.
Though I think if you do have the misfortune to come down with something incredibly rare and interesting, you’ll find the doctor-to-patient ratio (and the seniority/status of the doctors involved) will go up drastically.
Whoops, I did forget about the clinic duty. That seem a little more realistic.
When Vogler came in and was running the Board, one of the particular complaints he had about House was the fact that he only carried one patient at a time, and was therefore his department was not financially sound.
House is to doctors as James Bond is to spies. Sometimes, there are superficial similarities, but mostly it’s just good TV.
One of the major problems I have with House is that each patient will die or be cured in just a few days. If you talk to anyone with an undiagnosed or misdiagnosed condition, the process goes on for months… years… decades. They try one medication for three months, then switch to another for three months, then try the two together for three months, then try a different mix of doses for three months. Then you’re referred to a specialist who can see you next month and who schedules a test for the month after that. After yet another month, you review the results with your primary doctor who finds them inconclusive and spends three more months on another test.
I do not mean any of this as a criticism of doctors or the current system Even if they did have only one patient at a time, very few treatments work overnight. It might really take a month or two to see how/whether something is working. Doctors do not have instant-gratification jobs (for the most part).
If doctors did see only one patient at a time, they’d spend most of their time twiddling their thumbs.
House eats food. Usually Wilson’s. And this week’s ep was more realistic than most TV shows in that the character who had been asleep in bed for several hours had disheveled hair and didn’t have perfect makeup.
Other than that, I got nothin’.
Ditto if you’re either very rich (eg Bill Gates) and/or very important (President of the US, the Pope, etc).
House is terribly unrealistic, of course, but you’re not taking a few things into account, Nobody. In the first place, House’s team is explicitly a last resort for patients with severe illnesses that have resisted diagnoses. They are not doing the same kind of work as Wilson, who clearly as multiple patients at a time.
cond, House and the Baker Street Irregulars all have to do clinic duty, although of course House tries to get out of his as much as possible. So Foreman , et al, do have other patients. We just don’t see them, just as we don’t see them applying makeup, taking a crap, or doing any of the other things they surely do on a regular basis unless it’s plot important. It’s like people complaining about Kirk never going to the bathroom on Star Trek. Clearly there aremultiple bathrooms aboard the Enterprise, but since it’s not important to the plot, the producers trust the audience to understand that such scenes are simply not shown.
There are a few episodes where he’s the first person the patient seeks.
Foreman, et al, don’t seem to have time for other patients, but it was shown that Chase and Cameron had multiple patients when they quit working for House
House is only a TV program and very unrealistic.