Charles on… anything that comes along

The question just occurred to me, and I don’t quite know where to look for the answer. I’ve just been watching an episode of House, in which Hugh Laurie plays (brilliantly) the brilliant, grumpy genius doctor who somehow always gets handed the trickiest, most improbable cases.

The one I just watched - last week’s - involves a boy who was has some foreign DNA in him which seems to make him think he’s being abducted by aliens. The path to the answer is marvellously twisted. I don’t have a medical training, but I’m sort of on nodding terms with lots of symptoms and diseases (due to a really good O level biology teacher, I think - well done Mike Bull), so I find trying to guess the plot interesting.

But as the denouement came, with an answer that was both obvious and far-fetched (twins through IVF where one embryo was subsumed), I wondered: do doctors find House interesting? Well, do they?

Update: a million thanks to RAB, who points out that Polite Dissent analyses every episode of House from a medical perspective. They both deserve proper links - and now it’s done.

And since you’re wondering, the Polite Dissent verdict on the episode mentioned above is:

I give the medical mystery a B and the ultimate solution a B+ for being clever and not too uncommon. On the other hand, I give the medicine it took to reach the solution a miserable D. The soap opera earns a B+ this week because it was much better than last week.

Blimey - chimerism “not too uncommon”? News to me.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Why Tony Blair's new £3.5 million house is like Aldous Huxley's death (1 October 2004; score: 28.03%)
• August's mortgage details mean estate agents earned £241 per *office* (2 October 2008; score: 25.55%)
• Well, I laughed: "you have been evicted from the Big Iranian House" (4 April 2007; score: 24.85%)

Came across this one on a (sigh) “discussion”. I’ll leave it to you to guess whether it was Windows vs Mac or PlayStation vs Xbox 360:

“It clearly really is ‘beyond you’ to be able to understand why this is a problem, as you have displayed an ignorance so massive as to create its own gravitational field.”

Beautiful, just beautiful, particularly for its correct use of “massive”.

I have to say though that the past few months have been a complete education in the depth and strengths of feelings that people in the Xbox and PlayStation camps have for each other. (And they are camps, where they sit encircled, gazing into the campfire, telling each other stories about the Evil Ones On The Other Side.)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Zapping the boiler-room spammers (6 November 2006; score: 32.17%)
• "A full house of dysfunctionality": why we all hate automated answering systems (7 September 2004; score: 17.35%)
• Why do you use a Mac? The answer's in the question, sorta (30 January 2007; score: 15.19%)