I enjoyed watching the series House. It was about an abrasive, rude, unsympathetic, Vicodin addicted bastard, who happened to be a diagnostic genius of a doctor who only goal was defeating a disease or medical condition. A humane bedside manner wasn’t part of the treatment.
As he would sarcastically say, “Will I get extra Brownie points if I act like I care?”
The drama series ended in 2012 after an eight-year run, much to the disappointment of fans like myself.
As it turns out, the drama was enjoyed by at least one person in the medical field who put one episode to good use in Germany.
Imagine yourself as a 55 year-old German man who is suffering from severe heart failure, blindness, deafness, and enlarged lymph nodes. None of the doctors you’ve seen in the past months knows what the cause is and the best they can do is plan for a heart replacement.
Only when you are referred to Dr. Juergen Schaefer, a fan of the U.S. television medical drama, House are you given a correct diagnosis in less than 5 minutes.
Dr. Schaefer, who works at the Center for Undiagnosed Diseases near Frankfurt, almost instantly recognized the man’s symptoms from an episode of House in which Dr. House diagnoses a patient with cobalt poisoning.
Dr. Schaefer said the man’s symptoms matched up almost perfectly with a patient on an episode in which the fictional Dr. Gregory House, played by British actor Hugh Laurie, identified cobalt poisoning from a hip replacement as the cause.
The German patient that was referred to Dr. Schaefer also had a hip replacement. His broken ceramic hip was replaced with a cobalt one and fragments of the removed ceramic hip were grinding into his metal hip, leaking cobalt and chromium into his blood stream.
“We would have diagnosed this even without Dr. House,” Schaefer said. “You could have also typed his symptoms into Google and gotten the diagnosis.”
Once the hip was replaced, the patient’s heart got better and his other symptoms improved.
He said doctors should be aware of possible cobalt poisoning in patients with metal hip replacements.
Disclaimer: On January 4, 2016, the owner of WestEastonPA.com began serving on the West Easton Council following an election. Postings and all content found on this website are the opinions of Matthew A. Dees and may not necessarily represent the opinion of the governing body for The Borough of West Easton.
