House MD, also known as House, is an American medical drama television series created by David Shore and executive produced by Shore and film director Bryan Singer. The Emmy and Peabody Award-winning medical drama debuted on the FOX Network on November 16, 2004. The series is currently the most watched scripted program on FOX.
House stars British actor Hugh Laurie as the American title character Dr. Gregory House, a role for which he received the 2006 and 2007 Golden Globe Award and the 2007 Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor in a Television Drama. In February 2007, House was renewed for a fourth season, which premiered on September 25, 2007 in the United States and Canada.
Gregory House, M.D., is a maverick medical genius, who heads a team of young diagnosticians at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey. Episodes start with a cold open somewhere outside the hospital, showing the events leading to the onset of symptoms for that week's main patient. The episode follows the team in their attempts to diagnose and treat the patient's illness.
House's nationally-renowned department typically only sees patients who have failed to receive a correct diagnosis at other hospitals, so the cases tend to be exceptionally complex and subtle. Furthermore, House tends to resist accepting cases that he doesn't find interesting.
The team arrives at diagnoses using the Socratic method and differential diagnosis, with House guiding the deliberations. House often discounts the information and opinions from his underlings, pointing out that their contributions have missed various relevant factors. The patient is usually misdiagnosed over the course of each episode and treated with medications appropriate to the misdiagnoses. This usually causes further complications in the patient, but in turn helps lead House and his team to the correct diagnosis by using the new symptoms.
Often the ailment cannot be easily deduced because the patient has lied about symptoms and circumstances. House frequently mutters, "Everybody lies," or proclaims during the team's deliberations: "The patient is lying," or "The symptoms never lie." Even when not stated explicitly, this assumption guides House's decisions and diagnoses.
House's begrudging fulfillment of his mandatory walk-in clinic duty is a recurring subplot on the show. During clinic duty, House confounds patients with an eccentric bedside manner and unorthodox treatments, but impresses them with rapid and accurate diagnoses after seemingly not paying attention. Realizations made during some of the simple problems House faces in the clinic often help him solve the main case.
Episodes frequently feature the practice of entering a patient's house with or without the owner's permission in order to search for clues that might suggest a certain pathology. The creator, David Shore, originally intended for the show to be a CSI-type show where the "germs were the suspects,"[3] but has since shifted much of the focus to the characters rather than concentrating solely on the environment.
Another large portion of the plot centers on House's abuse of Vicodin and other drugs to manage pain stemming from an infarction in his quadriceps muscle some years prior, which causes him to walk with a cane. The pain and substance abuse act to increase many of his more objectionable character traits while not impairing his medical acumen, which leads him to often self-medicate.
House is in many respects a medical Sherlock Holmes. This resemblance is evident in various elements of the series' plot, such as House's reliance on psychology to solve a case, House's drug addiction, House's home address, House's playing of an instrument, and House's encounter with a crazed gunman credited as "Moriarty" which is the same name as Sherlock's nemesis. [4][5]
Credit: Wikipedia
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