• The 2026-2027 DO School Specific Threads are now available in the School Specific Discussions forum. The 2025-2026 discussions are now available in the prior year discussions forum.
  • Bring your 2026 application questions to our open office hours with Emil Chuck, PhD, Director of Advising Services for HPSA, and get them answered live. Personal statements, secondaries, interview prep, school list strategy. Sunday, May 17 at 9 p.m. Eastern.

house md

Started by Postictal Raiden
This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.
Postictal Raiden

Postictal Raiden

Full Member
15+ Year Member
Advertisement - Members don't see this ad
I am a big fan of House MD show.

I was wondering if there is such a "Department of Diagnostic Medicine" in every hospital, and all the complex cases get assigned to that department? Is "Diagnostician" a job title that is given to a physician who work in that department?
 
LOL...oh, that brightened my night.

Really, the variety of cases that are on the show would fall into simply too many departments. Hence, why this fictional department makes so much sense.

I believe I read somewhere that House MD is an infectious disease specialist, but a lot of the cases still fall out of this realm--who knows, but it makes great TV.
 
Advertisement - Members don't see this ad
Ibn Alnafis MD said:
I am a big fan of House MD show.

I was wondering if there is such a "Department of Diagnostic Medicine" in every hospital, and all the complex cases get assigned to that department? Is "Diagnostician" a job title that is given to a physician who work in that department?
Click to expand...

There's no such thing. It's TV magic. Essentially, a team of subspecialists work on diagnostically challenging cases. It's an exercise in the art of differential diagnosis. The lead, House, is double-boarded in Nephrology and Infectious Diseases. His fellows, Foreman, Cameron, and Chase, specializing in Neurology, Immunology, and Critical Care, respectively, complete his team.
 
"Department of Diagnostic Medicine" is a kind of joke. It's the kind of moniker that one might find written on a piece of paper taped to the door of the "go to doctor" who always likes to delve into difficult DDx cases. It can be deemed either an honor or a slight, depending... normally the latter. 😀
 
spicedmanna said:
There's no such thing. It's TV magic. Essentially, a team of subspecialists work on diagnostically challenging cases. It's an exercise in the art of differential diagnosis. The lead, House, is double-boarded in Nephrology and Infectious Diseases. His fellows, Foreman, Cameron, and Chase, specializing in Neurology, Immunology, and Critical Care, respectively, complete his team.
Click to expand...

You might as well tell him the whole truth:

Dude, there's no Santa Clause either. It's parental magic. Essentially a team of elves work all year making toys to be delivered to all the good boys and girls one night a year. Santa, a human with limited magical powers, makes the rounds with his team of flying reindeer, etc, etc.

Sorry, I wish they were both real too.
 
What, nobody's going to mention the fact that any doctor with House's demeanor won't be able to keep their job? 😀

House is such a classic example of an MD -- only treating the symptoms and not the person. :laugh:
 
Semicolon said:
House is such a classic example of an MD -- only treating the symptoms and not the person. :laugh:
Click to expand...

Meh, disagree in part. House is a Sherlock Holmes analog. He actually sees signs and symptoms as clues as to what is happening underneath, a common cause, as parts of a greater puzzle, not as things to be treated individually. He often includes behavioral and social aspects in formulating his diagnosis. Sometimes these elements weigh heavily in the etiology of the disease. However, what does seem to be evident is that he is extremely fascinated with the game, his scientific passion for solving the puzzle, and not so much by empathy or for the patient's sake. This makes him appear cold and uncaring.
 
Advertisement - Members don't see this ad
Hugh Laurie makes $450k per episode pretending to be a doctor on TV ... PC fields make around $150kish a year after training for 11 years. God ****ing bless America.
 
You'd also never have five doctors devoting their entire time to the care and management of one patient, maybe they'd consult, but they'd be juggling a bunch of other patients. There are too many patients and not enough doctors in pretty much every hospital, so to have an infectious disease specialist, neurologist, plastic surgeon, Kumar, and the sexy bisexual chick with Huntington's all focused on one case doesn't really happen.
 
Colbert said:
You'd also never have five doctors devoting their entire time to the care and management of one patient, maybe they'd consult, but they'd be juggling a bunch of other patients. There are too many patients and not enough doctors in pretty much every hospital, so to have an infectious disease specialist, neurologist, plastic surgeon, Kumar, and the sexy bisexual chick with Huntington's all focused on one case doesn't really happen.
Click to expand...

Buzzkill.









😀
 
JaggerPlate said:
Hugh Laurie makes $450k per episode pretending to be a doctor on TV ... PC fields make around $150kish a year after training for 11 years. God ****ing bless America.
Click to expand...

You know, I always wondered, how much does Fox (or whoever makes the show) profit per episode to be paying these actors so much money? How much do advertisers pay to have their commercials shown?
 
hopefuldoc87 said:
You know, I always wondered, how much does Fox (or whoever makes the show) profit per episode to be paying these actors so much money? How much do advertisers pay to have their commercials shown?
Click to expand...

I've always wondered how much the docs that they retain as medical consult make. Someone has to be feeding the writers the diseases/symptoms/treatments/medical dialogue. I bet those docs make a killing.
 
slim78 said:
I've always wondered how much the docs that they retain as medical consult make. Someone has to be feeding the writers the diseases/symptoms/treatments/medical dialogue. I bet those docs make a killing.
Click to expand...
I would love to do that. I know that the consul to Scrubs was a college friend of the creater. I forget his name but it is the guy the show is modeled after. It was in an interview on ABC.com. The guy that House was "based" on was I think a Pathologist from Chicago. There was an article a few years back called "The real Dr. House" about him in some popular magazine. I'd love to do that though, maybe I should move out to Hollywood.
 
Caesar said:
I would love to do that. I know that the consul to Scrubs was a college friend of the creater. I forget his name but it is the guy the show is modeled after. It was in an interview on ABC.com. The guy that House was "based" on was I think a Pathologist from Chicago. There was an article a few years back called "The real Dr. House" about him in some popular magazine. I'd love to do that though, maybe I should move out to Hollywood.
Click to expand...

JD is based upon Dr. Johnathan Doris, a fraternity brother of Bill Lawrence. It makes sense that JD & Turk are best buds from college. Dr. Doris consults on the show, although he was clearly AWOL for Tues' episode. Of course they make black scrubs!
 
Caesar said:
I would love to do that. I know that the consul to Scrubs was a college friend of the creater. I forget his name but it is the guy the show is modeled after. It was in an interview on ABC.com. The guy that House was "based" on was I think a Pathologist from Chicago. There was an article a few years back called "The real Dr. House" about him in some popular magazine. I'd love to do that though, maybe I should move out to Hollywood.
Click to expand...

beachblonde said:
JD is based upon Dr. Johnathan Doris, a fraternity brother of Bill Lawrence. It makes sense that JD & Turk are best buds from college. Dr. Doris consults on the show, although he was clearly AWOL for Tues' episode. Of course they make black scrubs!
Click to expand...

This thread is getting DANGEROUSLY off-topic. My apologies to the OP, as this thread was obviously about House M.D., NOT SCRUBS!! :meanie:

If you would like to further discuss SCRUBS, you'll need to do so in the official SCRUBS thread. Thanks for your cooperation. :meanie:






😀😀
 
Advertisement - Members don't see this ad
Boges said:
You might as well tell him the whole truth:

Dude, there's no Santa Clause either. It's parental magic. Essentially a team of elves work all year making toys to be delivered to all the good boys and girls one night a year. Santa, a human with limited magical powers, makes the rounds with his team of flying reindeer, etc, etc.

Sorry, I wish they were both real too.
Click to expand...

what about the tooth fairy?.........Don't tell me now that she's not real!
 
I understand that one of the sexy things about House is that he gets to say whatever he wants to whomever he wants, and gets away with it because "he's right."

Which will get you fired in real life. Even if you're right and you save lives. Tantrums get you in trouble long past kindergarten.
http://hotmedicalnews.com/doctor-are-you-a-disruptive-physician/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/health/02rage.html

House's coworkers would have lawyers falling over themselves to put together a hostile work environment lawsuit. Which they'd win.
 
DrMidlife said:
I understand that one of the sexy things about House is that he gets to say whatever he wants to whomever he wants, and gets away with it because "he's right."

Which will get you fired in real life. Even if you're right and you save lives. Tantrums get you in trouble long past kindergarten.
http://hotmedicalnews.com/doctor-are-you-a-disruptive-physician/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/health/02rage.html

House's coworkers would have lawyers falling over themselves to put together a hostile work environment lawsuit. Which they'd win.
Click to expand...

I think the practicing BUZZED off your ass on vicodin everyday would have gotten him the kind escort off the present FAR before the lawsuits.
 
JaggerPlate said:
I think the practicing BUZZED off your ass on vicodin everyday would have gotten him the kind escort off the present FAR before the lawsuits.
Click to expand...

Nope, that would have got him in a program, away from the unwashed masses of non-physician addicts, but he still would have to pee in a cup pretty often. Addiction is protected; hostility is not.
 
DrMidlife said:
I understand that one of the sexy things about House is that he gets to say whatever he wants to whomever he wants, and gets away with it because "he's right."

Which will get you fired in real life. Even if you're right and you save lives. Tantrums get you in trouble long past kindergarten.
http://hotmedicalnews.com/doctor-are-you-a-disruptive-physician/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/health/02rage.html

House's coworkers would have lawyers falling over themselves to put together a hostile work environment lawsuit. Which they'd win.
Click to expand...

Wow, those stories make things seem pretty bleak. It's very wrong that some healthcare environments have so much going on behind the scenes. With physicians running into even more problems and stress nowadays, I can't imagine it can get better anytime soon. Not to mention that physicians have the highest suicide rate in any profession in the country.

There must be two sides to this. I think they need to focus on helping the physicians so that they may help themselves (such as with the anger management programs mentioned), at least before dismissing them. It really is a shame.
 
Advertisement - Members don't see this ad
Semicolon said:
Wow, those stories make things seem pretty bleak. It's very wrong that some healthcare environments have so much going on behind the scenes. With physicians running into even more problems and stress nowadays, I can't imagine it can get better anytime soon. Not to mention that physicians have the highest suicide rate in any profession in the country.

There must be two sides to this. I think they need to focus on helping the physicians so that they may help themselves (such as with the anger management programs mentioned), at least before dismissing them. It really is a shame.
Click to expand...

In both stories, when they describe the tantrums these individual physicians throw, slamming keyboards, pitching a fit, etc., that's pretty much all I need to know. I don't care if this is Asberger's or poor upbringing or arrogance, it absolutely destroys any enthusiasm folks have for doing a good job and makes coworkers quit. I'd bet that anybody who tried to "help" these individuals (offering anger management etc.) found it not worth fighting (against a tantrum thrower) for.

In my past life I had to work with spitting mad, tantrum throwing engineers who made it impossible to get any work done, and I'd have been DELIGHTED if the organization had shown them the door. The fact that they were good engineers was completely overwhelmed by how much it sucked to work with them. The more people quit because it sucked to work with one guy in particular, the more it sucked for everybody who didn't quit, because the tantrums started being about how understaffed we were. Unbelievable.

Moral of the story: figure out how to not take hostages and throw tantrums. No skill set is going to make management fight for you if you're enough of a dick.
 
DrMidlife said:
In both stories, when they describe the tantrums these individual physicians throw, slamming keyboards, pitching a fit, etc., that's pretty much all I need to know. I don't care if this is Asberger's or poor upbringing or arrogance, it absolutely destroys any enthusiasm folks have for doing a good job and makes coworkers quit. I'd bet that anybody who tried to "help" these individuals (offering anger management etc.) found it not worth fighting (against a tantrum thrower) for.

In my past life I had to work with spitting mad, tantrum throwing engineers who made it impossible to get any work done, and I'd have been DELIGHTED if the organization had shown them the door. The fact that they were good engineers was completely overwhelmed by how much it sucked to work with them. The more people quit because it sucked to work with one guy in particular, the more it sucked for everybody who didn't quit, because the tantrums started being about how understaffed we were. Unbelievable.

Moral of the story: figure out how to not take hostages and throw tantrums. No skill set is going to make management fight for you if you're enough of a dick.
Click to expand...

You're right. I guess I wasn't thinking in such extreme cases. It's true that these physicians have done this to themselves, at least in part. I just assume that the majority of cases are not so bad as they would have articles written about them. In those cases, I feel that options should be given to those who are in danger of being dismissed; I don't think that underlying issues should be ignored, but I also don't think they should be used to "forgive" anyone either.
 
hopefuldoc87 said:
You know, I always wondered, how much does Fox (or whoever makes the show) profit per episode to be paying these actors so much money? How much do advertisers pay to have their commercials shown?
Click to expand...

The scale that these shows run on budget wise is ridiculous. I believe every episode of CSI cost something like 8-10 million dollars. A 30 second commercial only runs about 260-300k though. They also make mad money with discrete advertising in the commercials. There is also a reason that reality t.v. is so popular...it is dirt cheap to produce relative to a t.v. drama. I think about 1-2 million per episode..but my numbers could be off.

I find it funny that the guy that plays "Chase" in House is the only male that isn't a doctor in his family. I believe his brothers, his dad and his grandfather were all doctors. He only plays one on t.v., but I'm willing to bet he makes more money than all of them.
 
MossPoh said:
The scale that these shows run on budget wise is ridiculous. I believe every episode of CSI cost something like 8-10 million dollars. A 30 second commercial only runs about 260-300k though. They also make mad money with discrete advertising in the commercials. There is also a reason that reality t.v. is so popular...it is dirt cheap to produce relative to a t.v. drama. I think about 1-2 million per episode..but my numbers could be off.

I find it funny that the guy that plays "Chase" in House is the only male that isn't a doctor in his family. I believe his brothers, his dad and his grandfather were all doctors. He only plays one on t.v., but I'm willing to bet he makes more money than all of them.
Click to expand...

Isn't that just sad?
 
Getting to the OP's question, there is no "Department of Diagnostic Medicine" as is being pointed out, and House would make a horrible doctor and all that. However, there are plenty of jobs similar to what House does. For example, a lot of research institutes, like National Institutes of Health, have a clinical center where people go to be treated and they often have very unusual and hard-to-diagnose illnesses. Actually, most of the cases on House would probably end up somewhere like that, especially the chronic ones. And they take a whole lot longer than a few days to diagnose. In a typical hospital environment though, I don't think such a job exists. All doctors are diagnosticians. Even House can't do it all on his own.
 
dancinqt5013 said:
Getting to the OP's question, there is no "Department of Diagnostic Medicine" as is being pointed out, and House would make a horrible doctor and all that. However, there are plenty of jobs similar to what House does. For example, a lot of research institutes, like National Institutes of Health, have a clinical center where people go to be treated and they often have very unusual and hard-to-diagnose illnesses. Actually, most of the cases on House would probably end up somewhere like that, especially the chronic ones. And they take a whole lot longer than a few days to diagnose. In a typical hospital environment though, I don't think such a job exists. All doctors are diagnosticians. Even House can't do it all on his own.
Click to expand...

blasphemy
 
All though the title of department of diagnostic medicine does not exist, you better believe that there are infectious disease speicialists. They may not get the sexy unique disease everyday, as most of there days consist of treating fairly common diseases, they will get the cool cases seen on house from time to time.
 
dancinqt5013 said:
Getting to the OP's question, there is no "Department of Diagnostic Medicine" as is being pointed out, and House would make a horrible doctor and all that. However, there are plenty of jobs similar to what House does. For example, a lot of research institutes, like National Institutes of Health, have a clinical center where people go to be treated and they often have very unusual and hard-to-diagnose illnesses. Actually, most of the cases on House would probably end up somewhere like that, especially the chronic ones. And they take a whole lot longer than a few days to diagnose. In a typical hospital environment though, I don't think such a job exists. All doctors are diagnosticians. Even House can't do it all on his own.
Click to expand...

thank you, finally I got a serious response.
 
MossPoh said:
You were expecting a serious one?
Click to expand...

Yes because I was under the impression that all SDNers are grown up and serious toward helping and clarifying certain issues to others. I never thought that I would get such criticism just because I asked a VAILD question.
 
Advertisement - Members don't see this ad
Ibn Alnafis MD said:
Yes because I was under the impression that all SDNers are grown up and serious toward helping and clarifying certain issues to others..
Click to expand...

Yup ... there's ur problem. Rigggght there. :meanie:


It's not that SDNers are immature, it's more that they are sarcastic and answer similar questions all the time. Because of this, a lot of threads have this sort of undertone. Don't take it personal ... especially since you were asking a question that involved a medical TV show. Look for any other threads about Scrubs, or Nip/Tuck, or House ... and you'll see the same themes.
 
JaggerPlate said:
Yup ... there's ur problem. Rigggght there. :meanie:


It's not that SDNers are immature, it's more that they are sarcastic and answer similar questions all the time. Because of this, a lot of threads have this sort of undertone. Don't take it personal ... especially since you were asking a question that involved a medical TV show. Look for any other threads about Scrubs, or Nip/Tuck, or House ... and you'll see the same themes.
Click to expand...

I've heard that Scrubs gives the closest representation to actual practice. I wonder...
 
Semicolon said:
I've heard that Scrubs gives the closest representation to actual practice. I wonder...
Click to expand...

I honestly have very little experience (little under 300 hrs in a hospital, worked in nicu, l and d, ccu, and ER) but from what I experienced ... Scrubs, in general, is pretty dead on. I've never stepped in a hospital that looked ANYTHING like Princeton-Planesburo (is that right?) or seen a doctor who looked like Christian Troy.
 
Semicolon said:
I've heard that Scrubs gives the closest representation to actual practice. I wonder...
Click to expand...

I wish Scrubs was dead on...I still want to diagnosis my first IM patient with Kuru (throw back to the pilot episode for those who don't watch as much as I do). As for House...no physician knows everything. I knew a Renal doc that after seeing a patient with a stroke asked the med student on his rotation what to do because, as he termed it, this was not his "neck of the woods." The OB I worked with told me that all he cares about is everything "waste down, knees up and that might be pushing it." House, however, seems to know everything and this is why it is television. True House doctors exist in the medical team that takes care of the patient and not in one individual physician; although I am sure some primadonnas would like to think they are House.
 
The type of medicine seen on House is like "internal medicine on steroids." DDx-ing is basically what you do on IM; the Sherlock Holmes metaphor is a historical tradition among internsists. But "Department of Diagnostics" sounds sexier than "Department of Internal Medicine."

Overall, House is very unrealistic but has very beautiful people. Unfortunately, no one looks like Dr. House or Dr. Cuddy on faculty where I am. Rounds would be more interesting otherwise. Some residents though are very good looking, almost rivaling Cameron, Chase, and 13 in attractiveness.

As for the MD consultants feeding medical material into the show: they suck. They're recycling the same stuff over and over again, and the DDx process on the show is a reflection of bad medicine. Thankfully, I don't watch the show for the medicine (I would be dumber medically if I paid attention to that part) but for the character study of a really wounded, pissed off, funny dude.
 
Advertisement - Members don't see this ad
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

S
  • Question Question
Attending open house after interview?
Replies
1
Views
1K
Mr.Smile12
Mr.Smile12
Ho0v-man
DO vs Carib MD podcast episode
Replies
3
Views
2K
Ho0v-man
Ho0v-man
Meganerd2012
  • Question Question
DO acceptance or Conditional MD SMP acceptance
Replies
27
Views
6K
Meganerd2012
Meganerd2012
S
Interesting Take - Canadian MD vs US DO
Replies
2
Views
2K
sky778
S
P
MD reapplicant, DO first time applicant
Replies
4
Views
2K
Goro
Goro