Learning medicine from Dr. House

The TV series came in handy during many a press conference

As a journalist, you learn that all of life is a lesson that can be applied at various stages to your profession. Nearly everything is a scrap that gets stored away for the future: what you encounter on the road, who you meet on the bus, the vendor on the train, the pattern tiles on the footpath, even what you see on TV.

“Everybody lies!” is a lesson that every journalist will cherish and, as a principle, take with them to their graves. There are many more such gems from House M.D., the American medical drama about a misanthropic, brilliant diagnostician who cherry-picks his team and cases. Loaded with snark, Dr. House is a diagnostician modelled on Sherlock Holmes. He uses deductive reasoning and a dash of psychology to solve cases that have left others flummoxed. The premise of the show is “diagnosing the un-diagnosable.”

As a marginally misanthropic health reporter, there is little greener pasture than

House in terms of entertainment and domain knowledge combined. It’s where you intern. As medical terms roll off the tongues of Dr. House’s team, you are initially Googling furiously, but as the episodes and seasons grow, the terms become as much part of your vocabulary as theirs, keeping you wise company in the most technical of medical pressers.

Lupus is one such word, nearly a friend. An autoimmune disorder, it is often the first on the list of suspects in a mystery case, but rarely the answer. So imagine a health reporter’s glee when it leapt out at a press conference. As the patient sat describing her symptoms — severe body pain, swelling of limbs, loss of appetite, a skin rash — it magically appeared, singing across the room especially to me, a

House fan. Oh, the sheer joy of that moment! And there were many such.

I first encountered Situs inversus, where the organs are on the ‘wrong’ side of the body, in the formaldehyde-smelling corridors of the government general hospital. Wasn’t I excited to find the needle in the haystack when in an episode in Season 3, the doctors could not find a patient’s spleen where it was meant to be? It had switched sides, of course.

The first time an ectopic pregnancy came into my life was during a

House episode. Having stashed it away, I threw it out boldly at yet another presser, as the first slide showed up with a tiny foetus curled up in the fallopian tube instead of the uterus. The obstetrician-organiser looked at me amazed, only to ask later: “Doctor?”

“No, Dr. House,” I chuckled.