2 DVD
16 EPISODE
Series overview
Gregory House, M.D., is a misanthropic medical genius who heads a team of diagnosticians at the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey.[66] Most episodes revolve around the diagnosis of a primary patient and start with a pre-credit sequence set outside the hospital, showing events leading up to the onset of the patient's symptoms.[16] The typical episode follows the team in their attempts to diagnose and treat the patient's illness,[70][75] attempts that often fail until the patient's condition is critical.[70] House's department usually only treats patients that have already been to other doctors but have failed to receive an accurate diagnosis yet.[63] House habitually rejects cases that he does not find interesting.[16] The storylines tend to focus on House's unconventional medical theories and practices, and the other characters' reactions to them, rather than on the intricate details of the treatments.[3]
The team employs the differential diagnosis method,[75] with House guiding the deliberations. Using a whiteboard, House writes down and eliminates possible etiologies with a marker.[76] The patient is typically misdiagnosed during the episode and treated with medications accordingly.[75] This usually causes further complications, but eventually helps House and his team diagnose the patient correctly, as the nature of the complications often provides valuable new evidence.[16] House tends to arrive at the correct diagnosis seemingly out of the blue, often inspired by a passing remark made by another character.[75] Diagnoses range from relatively common to very rare diseases.[77]
Many ailments House and his team encounter cannot be easily diagnosed because patients have lied about their symptoms, circumstances, or personal histories. House frequently mutters, "Everybody lies", or proclaims during the team's deliberations, "The patient is lying"; this assumption guides House's decisions and diagnoses.[8] Because many of his hypotheses are based on epiphanies or controversial insights, he often has trouble obtaining permission from his superior, hospital administrator Dr. Lisa Cuddy, to perform medical procedures he considers necessary.[78] This is especially the case when the proposed procedures involve a high degree of risk or are ethically questionable. There are frequent disagreements between House and his team,[79] especially Dr. Allison Cameron, whose standards of medical ethics are more conservative than those of the other characters.[70]
House, like all of the hospital's doctors, is required to treat patients in the facility's walk-in clinic.[66][80] His grudging fulfillment of this duty, or his creative methods of avoiding it, constitute a recurring subplot.[70][81] During clinic duty, House confounds patients with unwelcome observations into their personal lives, eccentric prescriptions, and unorthodox treatments.[66] However, after seeming to be inattentive to their complaints, he regularly impresses them with rapid and accurate diagnoses.[14] The insights that occur as he deals with some of the simple cases in the clinic often inspire him to solve the main case.[16][82]
A significant plot element is House's use of Vicodin to manage pain, caused by an infarction in his quadriceps muscle five years before the show's first season, which also forces him to use a cane.[84] In the first season; eleventh episode "Detox", House admits he is addicted to Vicodin, but says he does not have a problem because the pills "let me do my job, and they take away my pain".[b] His addiction has led his colleagues, Cuddy and Dr. James Wilson, to encourage him to go to drug rehabilitation several times.[85] When he has no access to Vicodin or experiences unusually intense pain, he occasionally self-medicates with other narcotic analgesics such as morphine,[86] oxycodone,[87] and methadone.[88] House also frequently drinks liquor when he is not on medical duty, and classifies himself as a "big drinker".[89] Toward the end of season 5, House begins to hallucinate; after eliminating other possible diagnoses, he and Wilson determine that his Vicodin addiction is the most likely cause.[90] House goes into denial about this for a brief time, but at the close of the season finale, he commits himself to Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital.[91]
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