Zagreb (AFP) – He’s the maverick medic who loved to confound the medical establishment with his brilliant, unorthodox diagnoses. But Dr. Gregory House, the misanthropic genius who was the star of the long-running “House” television series, got an awful lot wrong himself, Croatian doctors claim. From a neurologist at work on the wrong end of a patient by performing a colonoscopy, to an MRI scan done by a physician who is clearly not a radiologist, Croatian researchers have pulled the American series up on its medical accuracy in a paper published this month.
Denis Cerimagic, a professor at Dubrovnik University, and two fellow neurologists— all big fans of the series—listed 77 errors after analyzing all 177 episodes of the show, which ran from 2004 to 2012. “We focused on the diagnoses of main cases, reality of clinical practice presentation and detection of medical errors,” Cerimagic told AFP. He and his peers—Goran Ivkic and Ervina Bilic—broke the mistakes down into five categories including misuses of medical terminology, misinformation, and simple weirdness—something which the show’s anti-hero, played by British star Hugh Laurie, possessed in abundance.
The errors included the use of mercury thermometers—which had long given way to digital ones, the term heart attack and cardiac arrest being used interchangeably when they are not the same, and the claim that vitamin B12 deficiency can be corrected with just one injection. Nor is there a universal chemotherapy for all types of malignant tumors, as one episode suggested. But arguably the biggest error of all is that Laurie—whose character’s genius for deduction comes from the misdiagnosis that left him with a limp and chronic pain—uses his cane on the wrong side. The stick should be carried on his unaffected side, Cerimagic said, though he understood why the actor had done it because “it’s more effective to see the pronounced limp on the screen.”
Their research also found medical procedures being done by specialists who had no business being there, like an infectologist performing an autopsy. At times the series also stretched reality beyond breaking point, with the findings of complex laboratory tests done in just a few hours. And doctors rarely turn detective and take it upon themselves to enter patients’ homes to look for environmental causes of illnesses. Not to mention Dr. House’s unethical behavior— “Brain tumor, she’s gonna die” the paper quoted him as saying—and the character’s opiates addiction. The researchers say they may have missed other mistakes. “We are neurologists while other medical specialists would certainly establish additional errors,” Cerimagic added.
Whatever their criticisms, the researchers say that modern medical series are far better produced than in the past, thanks to medical advisors. It is not like some 20 years ago when you had doctors looking at X-rays upside down, the neurologist said. “Now only medical professionals can notice errors,” Cerimagic said. Despite its flaws, they thought the series could even be used to help train medical students. “The focus could be on recognizing medical errors in the context of individual episodes, adopting the teamwork concept and a multidisciplinary approach in diagnosis and treatment,” Cerimagic said.
He said he and his colleagues were taken aback by the response to their paper “House M.D.: Between reality and fiction”—which is not the first academic study to cast doubt on the good doctor and his methods. “The idea was to make a scientific paper interesting not only to doctors but also to people without specific medical knowledge.”
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