HOUSE, TV SERIES

After breaking some ribs in a fall, I've been spending time on the couch watching TV shows. I've reinforced my dislike for HOUSE, the long-running series starring Hugh Laurie as a curmudgeonly but supposedly genius MD. It's not the trappings of the TV show which bother me. A glamorous hospital which has all the spiffiest procedures immediately available is much more fun than reality.

What I don't like is House himself. I first got to know Huge Laurie as a British comic actor, playing Bertie Wooster and other roles. The switch from comic roles to dramatic ones is not new; it's been done by Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, and Bill Murray, to name several quickly. I miss Wooster, but I'm impressed with Laurie's incarnation as a bitter American. Great work. I still hate HOUSE.

In the first I watched he had his team mislead a surgeon by a procedure which temporarily shrank a tumor to the size acceptable for surgery. You can't even think of such dishonesty, let alone not document anything in the chart. What a danger to patients!

That's not nearly as bad as in the next show, where he intubated a patient who had insisted on DNR orders. The patient thought he was dying of ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. House arrogantly decides that the patient's own doctor, a young attending who was previously House's resident, is wrong, and hijacks the patient. Of course House is right, and gee, even the criminal charges of assault and battery are dropped, but the ethical precedent is unbelievable. He should have been immediately suspended from the hospital, or, preferably, put out to be eaten by predators.

Disruptive physicians such as House are coming under great scrutiny now by hospitals who question the assumption that brilliance overrides everything. Even if this were so, dishonesty and lawlessness are not excused. HOUSE should go.