Medical Reviews of "House" • Hacker News Board

Re: Medical Reviews of "House"

#11

Post by ugh » Mon, Jun 21, 2010, 9:41 AM UTC

nearestneighbor wrote: post #10

ugh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Re: Medical Reviews of "House"

#12

Post by nearestneighbor » Mon, Jun 21, 2010, 11:39 AM UTC

ugh wrote: post #11

nearestneighbor wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Re: Medical Reviews of "House"

#13

Post by gte910h » Mon, Jun 21, 2010, 1:00 PM UTC

nearestneighbor wrote: post #2

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