House is the worst show on television, hands down.

I say this in complete seriousness. For some reason, this spectacle of medical fraudery and debauchitude seems to have gained some amount of crazed popularity among the television-watching public. I don't know who this "public" thinks it is, but I have no doubt that it is completely devoid of self-respect.

My friend Tracy and I found ourselves accidentally watching an episode last weekend. In our defense, we had been studying for our upcoming boards exam, and had rewarded ourselves for our hard work by watching a little of the so-called "boob tube." As it turned out, "boob" was right (in the old-timey sense of the word, whereby the term now liberally applied to female mammary anatomy was used to imply "a foolish person." And how.)

Now, Tracy and I are relatively smart gals. Between us we are near to completion of eight years of medical school and have an additional 2 years of a pathology student fellowship under our collective belts. But at one point we turned to eachother while watching House M.D., and exclaimed, "What the hell is going on?" All our years of medical training had left us unprepared to follow the plot line of House, a show based around a jerk-hole "genius" and his rag-tag team of young sexy internal medicine "experts" who together solve really challenging medical cases in a matter of hours, all the while learning valuable lessons about the meaning of friendship. Or something.

The episode Tracy and I watched was the one where Dave Matthews is an idiot savant who has something wrong with his brain. What is it? How can we possibly figure it out? It must be some logic-defying puzzle that can only be unlocked by the brilliant mind of one Doctor House, Medical Doctor.

All I know is that at one point the sexy young medical team was performing a carotid angiogram (something they would not know how to do), and then the next moment they were doing an upper endoscopy on a completely awake Dave Matthews (which is something that only gastroenterologists do - on sedated patients). Ooh! Now they are in the lab diagnosing neurosyphillis. Now they are snooping around somebody's house. And oh, what are they up to now? They are drilling through Dave Matthew's skull to get multiple brain biopsies!! I did not realize that in addition to being board-certified in Internal Medicine, the rag-tag team had also apparently completed a 7-year Neurosurgery residency!

Diagnosis after diagnosis is being spouted, one inappropriate diagnostic test after another is being performed by people who are wholly unqualified to perform them, all seemingly in a matter of hours. Is this entertaining to people who don't understand medicine? Does the fact that things are happening at lightening speed make them interesting, even if they are completely incomprehensible? I have yet to understand the psychologic complexities involved in the popularity of this show.

All I know is that in the end, Dave Matthews ends up with half of his brain removed, and Dr. House is a heartless lecherous jerk who is STILL addicted to pain killers and everyone else is, once again, surprised by it all. Case closed.

I am very aware that this entry reads like a very nerdy joke, in which I rant about televised medical inaccuracies that no-one else can understand, making my ranting more incomprehensible than the show that I am criticizing. But, ladies and gentleman, my life has turned out to be a series of one very nerdy joke after another. And with this I am entirely comfortbale.