This Doctor Is In

"It was pure nepotism," Liker jokes, describing the friendship the two struck up while their children attended Valley Beth Shalom nursery school.

An internist who once conducted research at the National Institutes of Health, Liker embodies the Hollywood cliche of Physician to the Stars. His official bio gives as much weight to a mention in Town & Country magazine as to any academic writings. In addition to his high-end private practice, Liker is medical director for the trendy pomegranate juice company POM Wonderful. And although he wouldn't dream of naming names, Liker readily offers that he has treated more than a few Academy Award winners.

In pressed slacks and tie, Liker looks out of place on a recent visit to the Fox lot in Century City. All around him are scruffy creative types in hiking boots, sweat shirts and jeans. Not a medical journal is in sight, not even in the office of David Foster, the physician-writer on the team. Although he has advised a handful of other medical programs, Foster gave up his own practice to work full-time on "House."

From the start, Shore knew the traits he'd give his central character: House had to be a superb diagnostician; he'd be unsentimental and smug, someone who doesn't talk about his past and shows little interest in other members of the human race.

"I write what I like, and I find likable characters boring," Shore says.

Part of the inspiration for the show came from Shore's guilt over pestering his doctors with trivial problems, such as the hip pain that had disappeared by the time he arrived for an appointment.

"I'm saying to the guy, 'It used to hurt here,' " Shore laughs. "They shouldn't be so nice to me. I've got to be wasting their time."

Liker's job was to give House the right credentials and keep the science relatively accurate. To make Shore's fictional doctor both brainy and exotic, Liker proposed board certification in three specialties -- internal medicine, nephrology and infectious disease, because in the post- 9/11 era bugs are "kind of a sexy thing."

House gets the lines we all wish we could deliver, resulting in a cascade of medical -- not to mention etiquette -- breaches. What other physician could get away with giving a pill container of breath mints to a hypochondriac patient or prescribing cigarettes for the Santa Claus with irritable bowel syndrome?

House routinely calls patients morons and liars and does not argue when one of his students speculates she got hired for her good looks and another thinks it was because his wealthy daddy made a call. He even flirts with a nun.

Some real-world docs grouse that "House" is giving healers a bad name.

Philip Brachman, who ran the epidemiology program office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and investigated the first anthrax epidemic in the United States, in the 1950s, is disturbed by the portrayal.