I love House. I watch the re-runs over the weekends, and the new shows on Monday night at 8 p.m. EDT. One of the biggest reasons I like the show is because every patient is suspected to have Lupus early in each episode . I think only one patient actually ended up with Lupus, but it’s nice to get the word out to the public. Over 1.5 million people in the U.S. has Lupus, including myself, who has a disabling case of it. Another big issue I like is House’s chronic pain issues and his use of Vicodin. A few seasons back, House went through a police investigation, headed by a cop out to get even for House’s treatment of him at the fictional Princeton/Plainsboro Hospital.
The World Health Organization has issued many papers stating how much chronic pain is under-treated. I know a lot about chronic pain. I also have fibromyalgia, which is a totally different bag of worms. I was on OxyContin, but I was feeling less pain as the Lyrica kicked in and was weaned off of it. But now it’s back, along with Lupus pain, and I’m now on Vicodin, just like House. But I don’t have friends that are doctors who are willing to write for any amount of Vicodin. Neither would House, in real life. Like Grey’s Anatomy, you have to take the medical stuff with a grain of salt. But the chronic pain issues are very real and much more common than you’d think.
So House is back on his normal Vicodin self-medicating. What people don’t understand is that if you have chronic pain, you don’t get high off of Vicodin. These Hollywood people who went through rehab to get off of Vicodin were addicted to the “high” they got from it. I don’t get high from it; if I take two tablets, usually at night, my pain will be mostly relieved, enough for me to get a good night’s sleep. I didn’t get high from the OxyContin either, and I was taking 80mg three times a day, with 5mg of oxycodone three times a day in between for breakthrough pain. It’s how House functions at such a high level. Vicodin relieves his pain but doesn’t make him loopy.
I also like House, because I can rarely figure out the true diagnosis of the patient. I praise the writers who find these rare, deeply-hidden-in-medical-textbooks illnesses. Once Lupus is ruled out, off they go about infections and neurologic syndromes and everything else in between. It’s a bit of a fairy tale how things get done at Princeton/Plainsboro Hospital. The fellows do all the tests, CT scans, MRI’s, Angiography, even blood draws. You only see a nurse when the patient either has a seizure, or cardiac arrests. I’d like to have worked on that unit. You could finish a couple books a week on your shifts. The fellows even hung the I.V. medications and give the oral ones too. My kind of unit!
But seriously, unrealistic medical practices aside, House is a thinking-woman’s show. You learn a lot of information and see how doctors diagnose unknown illnesses. Every nursing student and medical student should be made to watch it, just to learn a lot about weird brain fungi and skin sloughing off for no apparent reason.
Just don’t watch it with dinner, if you have a weak stomach; it’s pretty graphic and that’s the truth.
