Doctors Weigh In On The 40 Times House M.D. Got It Totally Right Or Horribly Wrong

Dr. House should have been dead from Tylenol o******e/liver failure like 3 episodes in.

Foreman. When he contacted a *Naegleria fowleri* meningoencephalitis in the episodes Euphoria. [S2E20-21] (the episode with the w**d farm watering system and blind pigeon).

I saw it during the year in medical college when we had the subject of Microbiology. We had to study the amoeba, and even looked it up for this episode. We even had a discussion about the topic in question amongst us friends, because mortality at that time (2014) was 99% with only 1 or 2 reported survival cases. Current mortality rate still is 97-98%. So at the time it aired, in 2006, survival stats had to be even lesser.

Not exactly what you're asking for, but I have an example of something most real world doctors could have caught.

There was an episode where the patient turned out to have Hemochromatosis. This essentially means that the body has a large build-up of iron in the bloodstream. I'd be amazed if an actual doctor missed that on the bloodwork

TIL: There are cases of this happening. Score 1 for House, I guess.

I have myasthenia gravis. The f*****g tensilon test on the bicycle road racer was hilarious.

I went from drooping eyelids and severely slurred speech to having control over my face and hands and then back again in like 5 minutes.

I didn't fall down, but I was right back to slurring.

Foreman was negligent for not seeing rabies in that woman. A f*****g bat flew from her homeless shanty tent.

As a doctor, House was probably my favorite medical drama. All the others except Scrubs are kind of all the same. That being said the medicine in it was all over the place, I wouldn’t say any of the diagnoses were particularly brilliant bc the almost of none of the conditions were diagnosed the way they would be in real life.

Years ago, I brought the show up to my Rheumatologist when my relatively rare disease was the diagnosis. He went on a long angry rant about how any competent doctor can diagnosis that show within the first 5 minutes. 


I didn't care. I'm not a doctor.

You have to understand, the show wasn’t written by doctors. It was written by TV writers with no background knowledge of medicine. 

None of it is brilliant medicine, it’s just entertainment. .

There are several rare genetic diseases (like factor V Leiden, which my mom has) that would have been immediately obvious in infancy or childhood so it is just an idiotic thing to include in a differential of an adult. Yeah, they might have overlapping symptoms but obviously the cause is different.

Brilliant: House diagnosing rare autoimmune or metabolic disorders with just a hunch—stuff like the guy with the exploding leg veins or the girl whose body literally produced its own p****n. Those are surprisingly plausible in the real world; some clever doctors actually do solve crazy cases like that.



No hope IRL: pretty much every patient who follows House’s ‘break all the rules’ treatments. Giving someone a risky d**g with 0 testing, doing experimental surgeries without consent, or letting them near a tapeworm trial? Most of those people would have died or sued in real life. Basically, House’s genius works on TV, not in any hospital worth its malpractice insurance.

Bringing a live pig into the hospital to exchange blood with a patient? Totally normal, I do it all the time.

It’s never lupus.

There's one episode where House sees a red thong and decides they must do a Congo red stain to test for amyloid.

He comes in " quick, put the Congo red on, polarise the light..."

Dude, it takes me an hour to do a Congo red stain and there ain't any magic microscope computer that can tell you it's type AA.

There is one episode where Chase is tasked with doing gram stains all night, next morning House asks him if he had anything, and he says "purple fingers" which amuses me greatly.

House's own injury would have k****d him before they actually diagnosed it.

Not a doctor but i work in the lab. One of the first episodes had a patient that they were worried was deficient in potassium. They broke into this persons house to see if they were right. A test for potassium can be done easily within 15 minutes of that blood work being drawn.

There was also one episode where they were checking for lupus? More specifically they did an ANA test and irl this test is done using a fluorescent microscope and looking at where fluorescent bound antibodies are binding on special cells. In the show one of the characters kinda shook a clear test tube and was like “well their ANA is negative!”.

Everyone actually had Lupus. He was just making all the other s**t up.

There used to be a Twitter thread about how all the House episodes would have been solved with basic medicines and all House did was prolong the process.

I don’t remember the link, maybe someone else has it.

I loved House as a show. But deep down I think it was created by Big Health Insurance to normalize doing insane tests at ridiculous cost to maximize profits. I also think CSI was created to normalize an increased surveillance state, so take it with a grain of salt!

I am binge watching House M.D., everyone's favourite diagnostician for the first time, and some of the fantastical scenarios while implausible are still interesting.

The show has some wild cases... and of course, the classic House diagnostic loop: throw out three exotic conditions, treat the wrong one, nearly k**l the patient, then circle back to the first idea they had. So I’m curious:

- Which diagnoses or treatments were actually brilliant medicine?

- Which ones would never have worked outside of TV land?

- And if the patients were real, how many would’ve actually survived? For days, months, or years?

I'm only part way through the show but enjoying every moment :).

Don't get me wrong, I adore House. But I think those writers only knew like five diseases. I think they had to bring in a guest writer for every episode just to have something to write about. Everything was either lupus or whipples. The one episode where somebody would definitely have died is (trying not to give spoilers) the kid whose cat died and dad breaks doc's nose, or the girl with a tick in her nethers. My favorite episode, though, is the chess kid with an attitude problem and a fondness for shrooms.