Top 10 Things House Gets Medically Wrong

Kyle’s health is failing fast and the team can’t figure out why. House wants to get a better medical history, but Kyle’s only living family is his dad Gabriel, who’s been in a vegetative state for ten years. House decides to wake him up using a cocktail of drugs and miraculously, it works. This plot point is based on a real discovery by neurologist Oliver Sacks – House even mentions the movie based on Sacks’ memoir. The problem is that Sacks was working with patients with a specific brain condition that responded to the treatment. Gabriel, on the other hand, is unconscious due to brain damage from oxygen deprivation he suffered during a house fire. No combination of drugs can cure that.

Everybody lies. But in Jordan’s case, it’s not her fault. Her compulsive lying is a symptom caused by a bleed in her brain. Cameron suggests treating her with amobarbital – a type of so-called “truth serum” – in order to get accurate information about what she did the previous night. Except, amobarbital doesn’t work the way Cameron says it does. Not only that, but truth serum is known to be highly unreliable. It’s too easy to unintentionally influence the subject’s answers by asking leading questions … exactly like Cameron is doing. The team learns this the hard way. Instead of the truth, Jordan tells Cameron what she wants to hear while she’s under the influence of the drug.

After sustaining a concussion in a bus accident, House’s memory is impaired. He’s certain he noticed a symptom of illness in one of his fellow passengers before the crash, but he can’t remember what it was. At Kutner’s suggestion, he has Chase hypnotize him, which works incredibly well. In fact, it gives him perfect recall, enabling him to see and hear everything on the bus as if he was really there. Of course, hypnotism doesn’t work this way, especially when it comes to retrieving memories. People under hypnosis are highly susceptible to creating false memories, meaning House wouldn’t be able to trust any details he recalled in that state. Considering how skeptical House is about most things, we’re surprised he’s so trusting of this process.

When a young woman is admitted to the hospital after collapsing, the team can’t agree on a diagnosis. Foreman insists that it’s cancer and talks House into giving the patient full body radiation, which knocks out her immune system. After the treatment, they discover that she actually has an infection that has progressed to sepsis. Foreman acts as though this is a death sentence. He explains that since the patient has no immune system, antibiotics won’t work and the infection will definitely kill her. In reality, patients with suppressed immune systems can survive infections, and antibiotics are an important part of that treatment. Medical mistakes can be costly, but in this case, Foreman’s screw-up didn’t necessarily have to be fatal.

Would you sacrifice one child to save another? That’s the impossible choice facing this family. Nick has leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant from his younger brother Matty to survive. Unfortunately, Matty has developed a serious infection, and the donation might kill him. Foreman performs the extraction with no anesthesia or pain control while Matty writhes and screams. Not only is this incredibly unethical, it doesn’t make sense. Doctors sedate extremely sick patients all the time. On top of that, jamming multiple gigantic needles into a little boy’s bones would be way more stressful to his body than sedation. We get that the episode needed to prove how ruthless Foreman can be, but this scene was hard to watch.

Lucy and Jasper’s dad has been using an over-the-counter testosterone cream to enhance his … performance. But he has no idea that he’s been sweating it out through his pores and accidentally transferring it to his kids. Jasper develops a crush on Dr. Cameron and starts behaving aggressively toward Chase, who he sees as competition. Meanwhile, Lucy’s eyes and the area around her heart become inflamed, and she starts menstruating – even though she’s only six years old. However, testosterone wouldn’t actually cause any of Lucy’s symptoms. In fact, it does the opposite. People assigned female at birth who start taking testosterone usually stop having periods. The writers on a medical show ought to know that sex hormones aren’t interchangeable.

Each member of House’s team has a specialty. Chase is an adult intensivist and surgeon. So in season two, when he decides to take a break from House by working in the neonatal intensive care unit, Cuddy should have shot that idea down. Doctors can’t hop from one department to another on a whim, any more than a math teacher can suddenly join the history department. The show makes this mistake all the time. We constantly see the team doing procedures that they’re not qualified for, like when House performed brain surgery in season three. Of course, when you have a small cast and you want your main characters to get all the screen time, you kind of don’t have a choice.

Sometimes “House” sacrifices logic for the sake of drama. Andie is admitted because she’s not getting enough oxygen to her brain, but tests reveal nothing. During surgery, however, the doctors find a tumor extending from Andie’s lung to her heart. Wilson explains that it wasn’t visible on scans because it’s growing on the heart wall, but this makes no sense. Any tumor big enough to cause Andie’s symptoms would be visible on an x-ray and MRI. This isn’t the only time the docs miss something major while running tests. Later in season two, Wilson performs an ultrasound to check for ovarian cancer and somehow misses the fact that the female patient has no uterus because she’s actually intersex.

House and the team spend most of this episode arguing about whether their patient has cancer. They can’t find a tumor, but they’ve ruled out every other option. Despite not being convinced that she actually has cancer, House decides to treat her with chemotherapy. The problem is that there’s no such thing as all-purpose chemo. There are many different chemotherapy drugs, and they each work on different types of cancer. If you don’t know what kind of cancer you’re treating, you can’t just order generic chemotherapy. If you pick the wrong type, you’re going to do way more harm than good.

We could have picked any one of a dozen episodes to illustrate this mistake, because it comes up again and again. You don’t shock a flatlining patient. Defibrillators are used to correct an abnormal heart rhythm, not to get a stopped heart going again. In fact, shocking a flatlining patient might make it harder to restart the heart. We get it – using the paddles is way more dramatic than watching someone do CPR. They make a cool noise, the patient’s whole body jerks, and you get to yell, “Clear!” That’s probably why so many medical shows get this wrong.

Which of these medical mistakes ruined the episode for you? Let us know in the comments below.