Medical Reviews of "House" | Hacker News Reader

Medical Reviews of "House"

politedissent.com

I wanted to ask House fans with any kind of medical background: are real doctors expected to have as much encyclopedic knowledge of even rare diseases as Dr. House seems to display?

My own experience with MDs, in good hospitals, was that they misdiagnose even simple and common things, that they should have been able to diagnose correctly, given the symptoms.

I'm no doctor, but even on the show, House's expertise is portrayed as extraordinary.

And he still gets it wrong at least three times an episode (twice if there's a compelling personal narrative to fit in as well).

I guess it would be similar in a way to how many algorithms/methods you are able to use from memory without referring to a reference in programming. I think we have a tenancy to assume people from other professions are super human experts while knowing that even after years of experience in our own there is still a lot of times reference material needs to be looked at.

House is a diagnostics expert, not just a MD.

I didn't realize that "diagnostics" was a medical specialty.

He is head of the diagnostics department (which consists of him and his team). And – as he says in the pilot – they are looking for zebras [1], not horses. By the time patients get to him all the horses have already been ruled out.

I don’t know whether something like that exists in reality. That would be interesting to know. It at least sounds plausible.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_(medicine)

It should be easy to check:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medical_specialties

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialty_(medicine)

I was so happy to see a doctor of mine go look things up: Human memory is not a good database. Repeat that 100 times.

I have always felt the existence of pages like these, picking apart House and actually analyzing the content, was a good sign. If House was way off base, it would simply be dismissed out of hand.

I don't know. I thought radiation to treat a possible brain tumor without knowing where it is was way off-base.

Oh, it'll be totally loopy sometimes. I never expected perfection.

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