House, also known as House, M. D., is an American television medical drama that debuted on the Fox network on November 16, 2004.
Series overview
Gregory House, M. D., is a misanthropic medical genius who heads a team of diagnosticians at the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey. Most episodes revolve around the diagnosis of a primary patient and start with a pre-credit sequence set outside the hospital, showing events leading up to the onset of the patient’s symptoms. The typical episode follows the team in their attempts to diagnose and treat the patient’s illness, attempts that often fail until the patient’s condition is critical. House’s department usually only treats patients that have already been to other doctors but have failed to receive an accurate diagnosis yet. House habitually rejects cases that he does not find interesting. The storylines tend to focus on House’s unconventional medical theories and practices, and the other characters’ reactions to them, rather than on the intricate details of the treatments.
The team employs the differential diagnosis method, with House guiding the deliberations. Using a whiteboard, House writes down and eliminates possible etiologies with a marker. The patient is typically misdiagnosed during the episode and treated with medications accordingly. This usually causes further complications, but eventually helps House and his team diagnose the patient correctly, as the nature of the complications often provides valuable new evidence. House tends to arrive at the correct diagnosis seemingly out of the blue, often inspired by a passing remark made by another character. Diagnoses range from relatively common to very rare diseases.
Many ailments House and his team encounter cannot be easily diagnosed because patients have lied about their symptoms, circumstances, or personal histories. House frequently mutters, “Everybody lies”, or proclaims
during the team’s deliberations, “The patient is lying”; this assumption guides House’s decisions and diagnoses. Because many of his hypotheses are based on epiphanies or controversial insights, he often has trouble obtaining permission from his superior, hospital administrator Dr. Lisa Cuddy, to perform medical procedures he considers necessary. This is especially the case when the proposed procedures involve a high degree of risk or are ethically questionable. There are frequent disagreements between House and his team, especially Dr. Allison Cameron, whose standards of medical ethics are more conservative than those of the other characters.
House, like all of the hospital’s doctors, is required to treat patients in the facility’s walk-in clinic. His grudging fulfillment of this duty, or his creative methods of avoiding it, constitute a recurring subplot, which often serves as the series’ comic relief. During clinic duty, House confounds patients with unwelcome observations into their personal lives, eccentric prescriptions, and unorthodox treatments. However, after seeming to be inattentive to their complaints, he regularly impresses them with rapid and accurate diagnoses. The insights that occur as he deals with some of the simple cases in the clinic often inspire him to solve the main case.
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