Real Life Dr. House

In this weeks New York Times Magazine, there is an article about a new department of the NIH (National Institutes of Health) that mirrors the kind of work done on the Fox TV show, House. The Undiagnosed Diseases Program combines a large group of NIH scientists and doctors, who possess all sorts of specialties. However, real life is different than the TV program, as the articles says:

But in the real world of clinical diagnosis, there is no crabby genius spending days and nights at a whiteboard, enumerating and eliminating hypotheses, barking at his residents and taking a stab at a succession of hunches until he happens to hit on the one that explains everything. The best diagnosticians depend on induction rather than intuition. Physicians call it differential diagnosis, and it is taught in medical schools as a process of elimination that occurs in a particular order. You amass all the information — the patient’s medical history, the results of the physical examination, the findings of as many medical tests as you can think of — and you ask, What disease could explain all these findings? What else could explain them? What else?

On television, the mystery is always neatly wrapped up by the end of the episode. In reality, many medical mysteries are never solved. And by the time people with undiagnosed diseases make their way to the N.I.H., most of the logical diagnoses have already been considered and rejected, making a nice tidy ending even more unlikely.

It sounds like a really interesting program that will make a profound difference. Not only for the patients, but perhaps even on the medical community as a whole.