[ExI] house saves lives

[spike]

Perhaps most of us here have viewed what is perhaps the best medical
detective TV ever made, House:

 

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60037-4/fu
lltext

 

House is terrific drama, a bit far-fetched perhaps, but I like it.

 

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.

 

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.)))

 

We need a medical system which can be data mined for this kind of
information.

 

spike

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