Daily BrewTV’s House solves a real-life medical emergency
Hugh Laurie
The cranky Dr. House of the Fox medical drama “House” must have at least known the prescription for his salary: $700,000 an episode. (Jordin Althaus/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)
Anyone who watches a medical drama on television and thinks their are learning about medicine may be pleased to know that, apparently real doctors do it, too.
Doctors in Germany managed to diagnose a 55-year-old patient with the rare "cobalt intoxication" after remembering what they had seen on an episode of House.
According to an article co-written by Dr. Juergen R. Shaefer, a patient was referred to the clinic in 2012 for severe heart failure. While the man's medical history was fairly basic, he did have two hip replacements.
Doctors excluded coronary artery disease as a possible diagnosis but still couldn't account for the man's symptoms, which included a fever and enlarged lymph nodes. And then someone remembered that the delightfully-acerbic Dr. Gregory House, played by Hugh Laurie on the popular medical drama House, once struggled with the same issue.
Searching for the cause combining these symptoms—and remembering an episode of the TV series “House” which we used for teaching medical students ... —we suspected cobalt intoxication as the most likely reason.
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Cobalt intoxication, or cobalt poisoning, occurs when there are excessive levels of the element cobalt in the system.
In the episode of House tiled "Family Practice," which aired in 2011 during the show's seventh and penultimate season, the cobalt poisoning was caused by a patient's artificial hip.
The same proved true in reality, with Schaefer confirming by X-ray that cobalt was found in the patient's metal hip replacements.
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While cobalt intoxication will now forever be linked to artificial hips, its roots will forever be connected to Quebec beer drinkers. In the 1960s, breweries accidentally caused a spate of illnesses after adding cobalt to their brews.
The article states that cobalt's stability makes it an excellent metal to be used in prosthetic hips, but improper placements and technical problems can lead to troubles. And the issue is more common than its appearance on a medical mystery show might suggest.
"This cobalt intoxication is an increasingly recognised and life-threatening problem," Schaefer concludes.
Well put, but House would have loaded some snark into his diagnosis.
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