I wanted to ask House fans with any kind of medical background: are real doctors expected to have as much encyclopedic knowledge of even rare diseases as Dr. House seems to display?
My own experience with MDs, in good hospitals, was that they misdiagnose even simple and common things, that they should have been able to diagnose correctly, given the symptoms.
I guess it would be similar in a way to how many algorithms/methods you are able to use from memory without referring to a reference in programming.
I think we have a tenancy to assume people from other professions are super human experts while knowing that even after years of experience in our own there is still a lot of times reference material needs to be looked at.
I have always felt the existence of pages like these, picking apart House and actually analyzing the content, was a good sign. If House was way off base, it would simply be dismissed out of hand.
He is head of the diagnostics department (which consists of him and his team). And – as he says in the pilot – they are looking for zebras [1], not horses. By the time patients get to him all the horses have already been ruled out.
I don’t know whether something like that exists in reality. That would be interesting to know. It at least sounds plausible.