House
Recently, Erin and I have started watching House on Fox. For those who are not familiar with the show, it follows the antics of one House M.D. as he diagnoses problems with patients. The problem, though, is that he has a tendency to never actually see the patients he is diagnosing, has three (or four - I really can't tell this season) assistants, and is more crotchety and irritable than me.
You might assume that House is merely a medical procedural show along the lines of E.R.. And if you are one of those people, you would be wrong. Instead, House is probably more closely related to a crime procedural than a medical one. Yes, it is set in a hospital; and yes, it does deal with medical issues; but no, outside of setting and what the main issues are, the similarities between House and other medical shows take a quantum leap in opposite directions.
Rather, the main character, House, has the opinion that everyone lies. As a result, he has morally ambiguous assistants that are willing to (in some cases) break into patients houses to search the homes for things that don't belong or could be the cause of whatever odd and out of place malady they are suffering from. As is true of most medical shows (that I've seen) the patients that House treats are actually have very rare and very strange diseases. The stranger the disease, the more abstract or obscure the symptoms, the better the program.
However, the draw to House is not that it is about medicine or that I can relate to the central protagonist, but the way in which medicine is practiced and the ethics that are followed/ignored as a result of the doctors. House, the doctor, employs people that will stand up for themselves, that will contradict him, and that will (also) challenge his assertions. Sometimes, though, he has to go to great lengths to get them to actually do the job he wants them to do. As a self-assured individual, it becomes easy for people to just assume that he is a) always right; or b) doesn't give a hoot about what they think.
Regardless, the show ends up being an exploration not only into the characters that are a part of the cast, but also into whether or not the patients are actually telling the truth about their condition and what led to them ending up in the hospital. In most instances (all that I have seen so far) House has been able to determine the cause of the disease further solidifying his edict, "Everything happens for a reason." This is not to be confused with the religious edict which begins (though unstated) "I don't know why this happened, but everything happens for a reason."
In the world of House, everything not only happens for a reason, but also that some reasons are intentionally left blank to seemingly protect the individual.
During recent episodes we saw:
A teenage boy who is a faith healer, brought low when it turns out he was infected with Herpes from a sexual encounter.A woman who was unexplainably sick... until they took her socks off.
A mother who wouldn't allow the doctors to test her daughter's bone marrow as a transplant option because the daughter really wasn't (biologically) hers... only to find out it was a treatable kind of cancer.
The show does an amazing job at delivering a mystery that needs to be solved. Setting up the state in which the problem took place (initially). Obfuscating the problem, often with tricky or complicated medical procedures. Determining the truth or legitimacy of the stated claims (of the patients) - as well as a moral argument over whether or not House should do what he is doing to establish fact and truth. And finally, toward the end, a solution to the problem, often after discovering enough (or all) of the information so that an education deduction can be made.
Sherlock Holmes, a creation of Arthur Conan Doyle, said, "...when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth...." House takes this to its conclusion and proves that once everything else has been eliminated, the improbably, even the impossible, often result in the cause and, as a result, the solution.
This show has proven to be very enjoyable and fun to watch. At times, like most medical-related shows (or current crime procedurals), there is a graphic level in what they show you, lots of blood, organs, and etc., but this is the exception rather than the rule in the show, with most of the episodes resulting in external factors and external stimuli to determine the problem rather than cutting into the body to explore and find the solution.
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