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Originally Posted by jacksonianmarch
I cannot stand the show. Too fake. Half the things he diagnoses you see once in a career and the majority of them dont have treatment at the stages the diseases reach in the show.
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IIRC, you profess to be a medical doctor. I understand and sympathize with your frustration. I hated
JAG and I loathed
Supercarrier because of how they portrayed the Navy. They just plain got stuff wrong, and they did it all the time.
House MD at least employs a team to ensure that what's going on could hypothetically happen. The most well-known member is Bobbin Bergstrom, who has a recurring role as a nurse as well as being the on-set medical advisor, but they actually check their script concepts with specialists. Just because the medicine could work doesn't mean that it's likely, but the ideas are possible...if not plausible.
Here's a quote from Andrew Holtz, a medical writer:
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First, let me say that something weird must be going on in the Princeton-Plainsboro area. I'd be wary of living in a community where so many really awful things suddenly strike people in the prime of their lives.
The short answer is that while the cases are highly improbable (and that's putting it mildly), they are not completely impossible. Of course, often what appears as one case is really a combination of strange features from several real cases. And some of the reports in medical journals that describe similar cases are autopsy reports; that is, the strange disease happened, but in the real world, doctors didn't figure it out in time, or even if they did, there was nothing they could do to save the patient.
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Originally Posted by jacksonianmarch
Plus, House is supposed to be an internist, but he does neurgosurgery, cardiac surgery, oncology, general surgery, ID..pretty much everything there is. In order for someone to get to where he practices, he's have to do 25 yrs of residency.
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Do you actually watch the show?
Dr. House is dual certified in infectious disease and nephrology. He doesn't DO much of anything, though: he has a team of three fellows who do the work for him. He also uses a variety of surgeons to assist him--he has a habit of walking into their Operating Rooms and contaminating the sterile environment to stop the surgery he's ordered because he's just realized that it would kill his patient.
The first season his three fellows did more than they should have--that's a valid criticism. House is a diagnostician, though: he gets patients with unknown ailments, and the show's climax is when they're diagnosed and referred to the appropriate specialist. Of course he'll see patients with widely differing issues. Furthermore, in Seasons Two, Three, and Four they've gotten better about restricting the work of every doctor except Dr. Chase, who seems to be able to do anything, perhaps because he's Australian and perhaps because he attended Divinity School.
In any case, what you're saying here doesn't really hold true, at least not for a few years.
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A TV show that just showed life as we know it would be boring.
Seinfeld was supposed to be "a show about nothing," but it had wildly contrived plot devices after the first six episodes or so. Perhaps
Murder She Wrote was a case where it got a little too bizarre--250 people in Jessica Fletcher's circle of friends die mysterious deaths and she solves the crimes, begging the question of why anybody would want to remain in her circle of friends unless they had a death wish--but all TV shows involve greater-than-average numbers of exciting things happening to the protagonists. At least in Greg House's case he's a world-famous diagnostician who allegedly attracts tough cases...even then these cases stretch the boundaries, but, hey, it's TV.
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I like
House, MD. One reason is superb acting by Hugh Laurie with a solid supporting cast. A bigger reason, though, is the screenwriting. The scripts capture what it's like to deal with a brilliant professional suffering from Asperger's, IMO.* I've known three individuals whom I consider probably to have had Asperger's, and they're all brilliant folks with significant challenges in interpersonal relations. The episodes capture that well. Few TV shows correctly portray what it's like to have geniuses around--
House MD does it well, capturing both the drama and, more often, the humor.
* An episode of
House MD strongly alluded to Dr. House's probably suffering from an autism spectrum disorder.