House may be a brilliant TV doctor, but that doesn’t mean that all the cases that are featured during the series are completely accurate. House stars Hugh Laurie as the titular character with a gift for diagnosing and treating patients with unusual ailments. Often, the cases that come across House’s desk can be extraordinarily rare, highly unusual, and a challenge for other doctors to properly assess, but thanks to his encyclopedic knowledge of illness and his critical thinking, House usually manages to save the day.
However, there have been cases on the show that defied logic and were dramatized for the sake of the show. Whether it comes down to House and his team making a complete shot in the dark guesses at something that has no real-world precedence, a series of unrelated symptoms, or even a fictional illness, House can stretch the truth. That being said, most of the cases do reflect real medical phenomena, but the show has been known to take liberties on occasion.
6 “Love Hurts” – Jumping The Gun
House Season 1, Episode 20
In general, House tends to get things right thanks to plenty of support from highly skilled medical advisors to ensure the show sticks to the confines of what is medically plausible and accurate, but there are times when things get missed. House season 1, episode 20 features one of the earliest errors to come out of the show when House’s team suggests that the patient, Harvey Park, has a heart infection. The reason they suggest this is that he suffered from a mitral valve prolapse, but that condition is fairly common as it affects about three percent of the population, and the underlying cause is not well understood, but it doesn’t result in a heart infection (via Penn Medicine).
Ultimately, the team discovered that Park had fulminating osteomyelitis, a bone infection, which resulted in blocked blood flow to the brain. This explained his earlier stroke, a display of aphasia where Park struggled to get the right words out, and some other symptoms. What makes this case so unusual, however, is the fact that Park just came in because he compulsively grinds his teeth and wanted to know if there’s a medical reason why.
5 “No Reason” – Unrelated Bizarre Symptoms
House Season 2, Episode 24
The season 2 finale was action-packed with House getting shot, a patient with a range of bizarre symptoms that never got resolved, and hallucinations throughout. While some of the episode plays out in Gregory House’s brilliant mind and may suggest links to a possible diagnosis, the central patient of the episode, who comes in with a swollen tongue, is never properly diagnosed. The imaginings of House, where the patient experiences intracranial pressure and his scrotum exploding appear to be fiction inside House’s mind, but together, these things don’t make sense and don’t lead to, or result in, an actual diagnosis.
4 “Act Your Age” – Side Effects
House Season 3, Episode 19
When a six-year-old girl is brought into the hospital suffering from a variety of issues common in women over the age of 50, House is intrigued by the case. As the mystery unravels, House eventually uncovers that her father is using an unprescribed testosterone cream, and the exposure to this additional testosterone has impacted his kids through his touch. While exposure to testosterone has been shown to bring on some puberty symptoms early in rare cases, the episode takes things well beyond what is plausible. The young girl suffered from several completely unrelated symptoms which didn’t add up to the diagnosis (via Forbes).
3 “Human Error” – Hole In The Heart
House Season 3, Episode 24
A pair of Cuban refugees make the dangerous trip to America in hopes of meeting the legendary Dr. Gregory House, to hopefully get a diagnosis of her illness that baffled previous doctors in Cuba. While in the care of House’s team, her symptoms worsened, with her suffering increasing, her forearm breaking, and a heart attack which effectively resulted in her heart-stopping. While her brain continues to work, and she remains on life support, House convinces her husband to accept her fate and take her off life support.
When they do, her heart begins miraculously working again on its own and the woman’s other negative symptoms disappear. House performs another scan and discovers the presence of a third coronary ostium, or hole in the heart. This is an extremely rare mutation, but the range of symptoms the woman displayed are not reported in other similar cases, with the mutation usually being found in early life due to issues with circulation, or only being discovered after death, as it could present as asymptomatic in nature (via NCBI).
2 “Under My Skin” – The Ballerina
House Season 5, Episode 23
A ballerina suffers a sudden attack as her lungs collapse during a dance rehearsal. As is often the case, the team starts her on a course of treatment based on their early assessments and, in an incredibly rare side effect, her skin starts to fall off. Ultimately, the illness boils down to a heart infection, but this should not have spread through her body as it did in the episode, causing sepsis and a lung collapse in the patient (via Forbes). As treatment goes on, the patient is at risk of losing her hands and feet due to the circulation in her body not functioning correctly, but this is resolved with the use of vasodilator medication which miraculously resumes regular circulation.
1 “Known Unknowns” – Truth Serum
House Season 6, Episode 6
A teenage girl arrives in the hospital suffering from extreme swelling in her extremities. The girl’s condition rapidly deteriorates with severe internal bleeding, while the team desperately scrambles to investigate. In an effort to buy more time, they gave the young girl blood transfusions, but her condition continued to get worse. Despite efforts to help her, the girl also continued lying about the events of the previous night, which made it difficult to piece together the truth about what was causing her illness.
Ultimately, House is able to determine that the girl is suffering from vibrio vulnificus, a type of infection caused by her consumption of oysters, which she was susceptible to because of a weakened immune system. However, this kind of reaction, with swelling of her appendages and internal bleeding, is inconsistent with vibrio infections caused by ingesting oysters and instead has more similarities to someone contracting the illness through an open wound (via CDC). This episode of House also features the team injecting the girl with “truth serum,” which is not a real thing. Amobarbital, the drug they suggest is a truth serum, is in fact simply a medication more commonly used for anxiety.
