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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Perhaps most of us here have viewed what is perhaps the best medical detective TV ever made, House:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><a href="http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60037-4/fulltext">http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60037-4/fulltext</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>House is terrific drama, a bit far-fetched perhaps, but I like it.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>A long time ago, back before ER became just another silly soap opera, they really had a lot of content in their shows from a medical science perspective. I have a bunch of friends who went to medical school together, who would have ER parties every week for years. That show, at least in its early seasons, taught a lot of young medics about the more obscure conditions. House is even better, but it deals with even more obscure stuff.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>It occurred to me in those days that in general, a good technically accurate medical drama, such as House and ER, could be a means of educating the unwashed masses as well as the washed doctors. But it could also cause waves of incorrect self-diagnoses. It would be interesting to see if we could find correlations between the show and diagnoses. Example, right after Chen and Malucci killed a Marfan patient in 1999, see if more doctors recognized the obscure Marfan Syndrome. (That episode really got to me: I am tall and skinny, so I could be mistaken for a drug addict (I don’t touch dope) The real problem might be a Marfan-ish tendency. If I were to be taken to the ER unconscious, I could be slain by being Chen-Malucci-ed to death, oy. (I looooved season 8, before Malucci was fired. (He was my favorite incompetent doctor.)))<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>We need a medical system which can be data mined for this kind of information.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>spike<o:p></o:p></p></div></body></html>