What happened to you, Dr. House?

I know someone who had just become a doctor last August. He was very serious when it cam to his studies and was always pressuring himself to do well, to exceed, to be the number 1. Actually, I admired him in that aspect and always thought that if could only give me an ounce of his academic conscientiousness then I would be all set to finish law school with pizazz. Too bad he didn't give much of that diligence away. At any rate, the whole point of that introduction is to establish that he was a very serious med student and despite that, he watched "House". In fact, he loved House. He even told me that there was a time (or maybe two) that they actually watched the show during one of their med school classes. Now I'm not sure whether we should be afraid our future doctors are watching medical dramas but let's just try to offset this seeming absurdity by the fact that his school is one of the supposed "top" med schools in the Philippines (...or perhaps this makes it more absurd).

To the uninitiated, Dr. House, the series focuses on its protagonist, guess who - Dr. Gregory House, a limping, grouchy, mean-spirited Vicodine addict. He breaks (or orders his interns to do so) into patients' houses to learn their medical history, steals personal items, lies, cheats and pretty much does what a common criminal does ("Patients lie" - according to him)... but does he get results! He is the go-to guy for unexplainable diseases - ones no one else can diagnose, much less treat. This is because he knows how to take in all symptoms and filter out those which are merely secondary, tertiary and irrelevant. He knows by sight, smell, feel or taste (eww) what could be wrong, like a funny, grousing bomb-sniffer.

I'm pretty sure that any one who had a really sick relative, one time or another, wished that Dr. House really existed. Well guess what? In the great land of Britain, he doe... in the person of a non-person. In Britain, just a few weeks ago, a space-age sickbay was unveiled. It can diagnose illnesses without the need for actual examinations

It uses thermal imaging to replace a human doctor's vision; breath analysis for the olfactory sense and ultrasound as well as blood oxygen measurement for the http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifsenhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifse of touch (taking the pulse.

With all these high-tech gadgets (some even used on Mars), I guess it should really provide precise results and perhaps pave the way to root out human error or subjectivity and accurately diagnose illnesses. Because it is high-tech, there is no doubt that only the rich can afford it... hopefully, just in the meantime.

Now we haven't really heard how effective this "Space-age Sickbay" is but we are hoping it is going to be just as effective and just as creative in diagnosing diseases as House is... only without the limp and the Vicodine addiction. The foul mouth we can handle.

Read the article here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2032378/Space-age-sickbay-diagnoses-disease-need-tests.html

Entry #12