This Doctor Is In

"It plays down the seriousness of what physicians do," he says after watching the show and reading several scripts. "I don't think this is typical."

Even more unusual -- some would say unbelievable -- are the cases House and his team of doctors-in-training tackle each week. Brachman says the episode in which a woman develops a tapeworm in her brain from eating ham was just one of the wacky cases he had trouble swallowing.

And then there was Sister Augustine, the demure nun who developed a near-fatal reaction from an copper IUD accidentally left inside her for 30 years. Turns out that before she took her vows, she had lived on the streets, got into drugs and attempted to self-abort a pregnancy.

As head of the allergy division at George Washington Hospital and former president of the Medical Society of D.C., Daniel Ein is pretty familiar with allergic reactions. In all his years practicing, he's never seen or heard of that one. "From a medical point of view, it's terribly farfetched," Ein says.

But that's the whole point.

"Making a fetish of realism is a mistake," says Laurie.

One week it's African sleeping sickness, the next it's pesticide poisoning from unwashed jeans. Bats infect a homeless woman with rabies and termites cause a teenager to develop acute naphthalene toxicity. (Although most episodes end with a miraculous eleventh-hour save, Liker "insisted" the rabies victim die for the sake of accuracy.) The real fun comes as House eventually deciphers the medical clues, à la Dr. Joseph Bell, the man who was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.

"If there's certainty in the diagnosis and certainty about how to treat, then where's the drama?" says Liker. His job is often to find the "decoys" or false diagnoses that send the "House" cast down the wrong medical path.

What looks to be anthrax turns out to be leprosy. What started out as a case of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, is a birth defect of the circulatory system called arteriovenous malformation.

When the doctors discover three infants with high fevers and low blood pressure, it looks like a bacterial infection. But the treatment causes fatal kidney failure in one baby and the autopsy reveals a virus. The remaining babies test positive for three different viruses, and they don't have enough blood for the doctors to keep testing. House rolls the dice with an experimental drug and -- presto! -- the mystery is solved. Roll credits.

"It turns out we get it wrong three times and right on the fourth. It has something to do with commercial breaks," says Laurie, candid about the constraints of a 43-minute weekly format.

The son of a British physician, Laurie brings to the program an appreciation for the world of medicine, quirky patients and all. As a teen, he answered his father's phone and often found himself uh-huhing through the caller's litany of aches and pains.