He is the illustrious physician who loved to confound doctors with his brilliant, unconventional diagnoses.
Croatian doctors contend that Dr. Gregory House, the misanthropic genius who was the star of the multi-award-winning “House” television series, himself committed many errors.
Croatian researchers have increased the American series’ medical accuracy in a paper released this month after performing a colonoscopy on the wrong side of a patient or an MRI on a doctor who is clearly not a radiologist.
After analyzing every single episode of the show, which ran from 2004 to 2012, Denis Cerimagic, a professor at Dubrovnik University, and two other fellow neurologists, both of whom were devoted fans, put up a list of 77 errors.
Cerimagic told AFP, “We focused on the main cases’ diagnoses, the reality of clinical practice presentation, and the detection of medical errors.”
The mistakes were broken down into five categories: misuses of medical terminology, misinformation, and simple weirdness, which the show’s anti-hero, played by British actor Hugh Laurie, possessed in abundance.
That sluggish
The term heart attack and cardiac arrest are interchangeably used when they are not interchangeable, and vitamin B12 deficiency can be corrected with just one injection, according to them, along with the use of mercury thermometers, which had long replaced digital ones.
As one episode suggested, there is also no universal chemotherapy for all types of malignant tumors.
The biggest mistake of all is that Laurie uses his cane on the wrong side, which is the character’s genius for deduction coming from the misdiagnosis that left him limping and suffering.
Cerimagic suggested that the actor carry the stick on his unaffected side, even though he understood why the actor did it because “it’s more effective to see the pronounced limp on the screen.”
Additionally, according to their research, medical procedures were performed by experts who had no business working there, such as an autopsy performed by an infectologist.
With the results of complex laboratory tests carried out in a few hours, the series occasionally stretched reality beyond the limits. And doctors rarely go into patients’ homes to look for environmental causes of illness.
Not to mention Dr. House’s unethical behavior (he was quoted as saying in the paper’s article as saying, “Brain tumour, she’s gonna die”) and the character’s opiates addiction.
The researchers claim they may have missed other errors.
Cerimagic continued, “We are neurologists, but other medical specialists would undoubtedly establish additional errors.”
medical blunders
Despite their criticisms, the researchers claim that medical advisors have made modern medical series much more popular than they have in the past.
The neurologist claimed that it is not like it was 20 years ago when doctors were examining X-rays in the face.
Cerimagic claimed that only medical professionals can now identify errors.
Despite its flaws, they believed the series could be used to aid in the training of medical students.
According to Cerimagic, the emphasis could be on acknowledging medical errors in the context of individual episodes, adopting the teamwork principle, and adopting a multidisciplinary approach to diagnosis and treatment.
He claimed that the response to his and his colleagues’ paper, “House M. D.: Between reality and fiction,” was surprising because it was not the first academic study to doubt the good doctor’s methods.
