![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
More House ramblings.
So, one bad side-effect of spending an entire weekend watching House, and then a whole work day alternately reading House fic and googling "thigh infarction" and reading the resulting medical literature... mysterious ache in my right thigh. Stupid suggestibility.
The googling, incidentally, leads me to believe that House's thigh infarction was an episode of Diabetic Muscle Infarction (DMI) which, in a small minority of cases, occurs in people who don't have diabetes. I read some articles (my favorite is available here or here) which detailed the disorder - the only reliable symptom is, as the man said, pain; average age at onset is about forty. The condition can result in muscle death although in most (presumably most correctly diagnosed) cases it resolves on its own. The condition is very rare - the article linked above surveys all cases the author could locate records of: 166 episodes involving 115 patients - and frequently misdiagnosed even in people who have completely typical histories for it. Treatment seems to be limited to bed rest, pain relief, and physical therapy. Cause and progression of DMI is poorly understood.
Also, it occurred to me today that House seems to have more or less stopped practicing medicine for a period of years. I've no idea how he got tenure (was he already working for the hospital or university in some other capacity?) but Cuddy says he hasn't worked at the clinic anytime in the last six years, and implies that he hasn't been doing much of anything else, either. Am I missing something, here? Do we have any idea what he's been doing in the last six years? And if he did stop completely - why? Did the infarction make him cripplingly (ha) aware of his own fallibility? I've read somewhere that the God complex doctors demonstrate, maddening as it is, is also sometimes necessary for their work - they have to believe they're that good, they have to believe they're right, or they'd never dare to do anything at all. Are we seeing House emerge from a long period of self-doubting paralysis? And if so, might his profoundly callous behavior be simply a desperate effort to convince himself that he can do this?
Also, I saw Chase's "I'm Australian!" bit last night. I heart Chase.
The googling, incidentally, leads me to believe that House's thigh infarction was an episode of Diabetic Muscle Infarction (DMI) which, in a small minority of cases, occurs in people who don't have diabetes. I read some articles (my favorite is available here or here) which detailed the disorder - the only reliable symptom is, as the man said, pain; average age at onset is about forty. The condition can result in muscle death although in most (presumably most correctly diagnosed) cases it resolves on its own. The condition is very rare - the article linked above surveys all cases the author could locate records of: 166 episodes involving 115 patients - and frequently misdiagnosed even in people who have completely typical histories for it. Treatment seems to be limited to bed rest, pain relief, and physical therapy. Cause and progression of DMI is poorly understood.
Also, it occurred to me today that House seems to have more or less stopped practicing medicine for a period of years. I've no idea how he got tenure (was he already working for the hospital or university in some other capacity?) but Cuddy says he hasn't worked at the clinic anytime in the last six years, and implies that he hasn't been doing much of anything else, either. Am I missing something, here? Do we have any idea what he's been doing in the last six years? And if he did stop completely - why? Did the infarction make him cripplingly (ha) aware of his own fallibility? I've read somewhere that the God complex doctors demonstrate, maddening as it is, is also sometimes necessary for their work - they have to believe they're that good, they have to believe they're right, or they'd never dare to do anything at all. Are we seeing House emerge from a long period of self-doubting paralysis? And if so, might his profoundly callous behavior be simply a desperate effort to convince himself that he can do this?
Also, I saw Chase's "I'm Australian!" bit last night. I heart Chase.