April 30, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:Question of the day
So how come, like, every single patient on House goes into liver failure?
Posted by Jane Galt at April 30, 2007 10:51 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links
At some point, it's best to stop caring about what is occuring medically to the patients, and just view them as marginally animated set direction. For me, this happened after seeing a batch of episodes on DVD where the patients managed to have anthrax, bubonic plague, and scurvy. The liver failure thing is used because it puts people in mortal danger over a time-frame short enough to fit into an episode but long enough that they don't just keel over before the first commercial.
But, but...House is the closet thing we have to a John Galt in current popular culture!
Because they didn't get to see you in a miniskirt? :-)
I dunno about liver failure, but they have to lapse into a coma at the half-hour mark, right after bleeding from any two orifices.
Season 2 it was Lupus. XD
I guess its because almost every life threatening illness will affect the liver? (except a few, I guess)
Apparently, when you have disease, it's always the liver. As compared to when you get shot or stabbed in the torso, in which case it's always the spleen (unless the script requires a hit-kill shot, in which case it's either the heart, or not clearly shown).
Limb wounds, meanwhile, must always go one of two ways: If it's a major character who is critical to the future plot, the wound sutures and morphines itself within five minutes, permitting the character to continue onward with, at most, a slight limp. In any other case, it breaks either a bone or an artery.
Taking a rather jaundiced view of the show, aren't we?
The writers need to realize that their procedural medical show is below average at best and start using the patients as props to tell us interesting things about the characters. Scrubs did an excellent job of this during its first 3 or 4 seasons.
Writers are famously fond of the bottle. So it's simply projection of their inner fears by the show's writers
yeah, I was going with the "don't drink" PSA message too...
but, upon reflection mini-skirt sounds like a perfectly good reason too ;)
"House" used to annoy me until realized the show was not a medical drama, but a fantasy. Any real doctor who acted like House would of course be fired, jailed and/or punched out every single week, no matter how brilliant he was. The show probably wouldn't work at all if not for Hugh Laurie. (Any chance for Stephen Fry doing a guest spot, guys?)
"House" used to annoy me until realized the show was not a medical drama, but a fantasy.
You mean the hospital with six doctors, where four of them do every possible diagnostic and surgical procedure and a fifth does nothing but yell at House?
It's not my imagination that the show has completely changed in the last couple of months, right? Has some obsessive among you noticed who (writers, producers?) has changed in the credits?
All they would have to do is every test they have at the beginning of every episode, and they would immediately find out what's really wrong with the patient.
Of course, in real life, that would be really expensive, and every episode would be about 10 minutes.
The next time I have to go to the emergency room for a broken toe, I plan to demand a lumbar puncture. Doesn't every patient need one?
Its not just liver failure, they seem to have to nearly kill the patient off at least three times before they can find out what's wrong. It would be more believable if they went to a 30 minute show and only had to nearly kill the patient off once before saving them.
Talk about hard to believe! What about the episode where the pregnant woman was sick and House kept saying that she needed to abort the fetus and then when they end up operating on the baby (in utero) the fetus grabs House's finger and from then on, House called the fetus a "baby"?
C'mon! No one is going to believe that there might actually be a sorta, maybe pro-life writer in Hollywood.
Get real.
The problem is that you're taking the medicine seriously. Even with the magnet effect a doctor like House would create, there is no way you'd see all the crap he sees in that kind of a time span, nmever mind the fact that there's absolutely nobody who comes in with anything normal. Something normal happens, he yells "Epidemic!", and he's right. Probably half the episodes he has no reason to believe that anything unusual is going on, and yet because it's a TV show about bizarre diseases, it's invariably a bizarre disease, thus justifying the absolutely ludicrous means he goes to.
Stop watching it as a medical drama, start treating it as an excuse for Hugh Laurie to put on an American accent and be a jackass. It's way more fun that way.
Treating the question seriously for the moment, rather than getting into a critique of the show: it seems to me that a lot of things can mess up the liver in real life. Of all the ads for medicines on TV, how many don't include a warning about possible liver damage? Damn few, seems to me.
Well, sure -- besides creating bile, which is important in the digestion of fats, the liver is the body's primary bloodstream filter. Anything soluable in your body is likely to pass through the liver at least once, which then has to do something about it.
Actually, Reagan Fan, isn't not beyond the realm of possibility that there would be a pro-life writer (or a pro-choice writer who wants to be fair and represent the opposing viewpoint) in Hollywood.
What such people often do is hide, in order to avoid the scorn of their peers and perhaps keep working until they get to big to be effectively marginalized, and sneak messages into film, TV, etc.
"C'mon! No one is going to believe that there might actually be a sorta, maybe pro-life writer in Hollywood."
Oh please!
If you can make somebody some money, you can work in Hollywood.
"...there is no way you'd see all the crap he sees in that kind of a time span, nmever mind the fact that there's absolutely nobody who comes in with anything normal. "
Actually, last week a woman came in with a staph infection.
They killed her.
They are playing on the fears of their target market.
The show is just trying to be 'hep'.
You can't have a plot on my show without fear of death and you can't live without your LIVEr.
It's also diagnostically more rich than heart, lungs, or at least its failures are less in the popular lexicon and thus we are far more liberty to make shit up.
And what do Prostate Specific Antigens have to do with announcements of the public service variety anyway? You should be talking to Wilson instead. Idiot.
Now what channel was that soap opera on...the one I was watching back in the days when we would see other doctors milling about the hospital as I scored their TVs...those morons. I was so pleased the writers gave up on including other doctors as any kind of foil to my Grousy McSnarky 'tude delivery.
Actually, given that Tim Minear's "Drive" was recently cancelled, I have another theory: the liver is a metaphor for many of the truly good shows that Fox has ever piloted.
Another odd thing about the show: there are almost no nurses. Sometimes nurses show up to go out with a doctor, but they're rarely evident when medicine is happening and a hospital wouldn't be without several.
The show, which I've watched consistently since it started, is jumping the MRI. What's-his-name was having sex with Cameron, who has a personality transplant and puts a stop to it because he likes her... .
"...What's-his-name was having sex with Cameron, who has a personality transplant and puts a stop to it because he likes her... . "
They are doing a "head-heart-stomach" switcheroo.
The head-heart-stomach (intellect, emotion, passion) trio (common in literiture - 3 Musketeers, Harry Potter)was originally Forman as head, Cameron as heart and Chase as Stomach (or a little lower). The last few weeks have been dedicated to shattering the monolithic nature of their character.
Last nite, House was on the verge of firing Forman because he was too timid - he was overthinking and becoming too cautious. Forman wound up extracting bone-marrow from a screaming kid without aenestesia because there was no other way to save his brother. He needed visceral passion to do so.
Reagan Fan -
The episode that you mentioned may have shown House softening up a bit by calling a wanted fetus a 'baby', but I can't help recalling an earlier episode where House was proud of having rushed a rape victim into an abortion without giving her even a few days to think it over. It was the episode where the rape victim refused to talk to anyone but House about what had happened to her.
After finding out that she was pregnant, the woman expressed some very strong views about abortion being wrong and about how she didn't want to have one. House not only talked her into it, he convinced her to do it quickly, when she was obviously still in shock over the rape and had only known for a few days that she was pregnant.
Surely rape victims shouldn't rush into anything, particuarly not into doing something irrevocable that they were strongly opposed to. Yet House saw no need to hesitate once he had pushed the rape victim around to the 'correct' viewpoint. I didn't see a strong pro-life bias in that episode.
Were the writers the same Ann? You realize that television shows often have 5-8 writers that work on a particular show? And it's more than likely House's position on abortion isn't something in the show's bible so writers can take liberties with it.
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