Dr. House M.D. reviews. S1E08. Poison

It was a decent episode of House tonight. The character moments were good and the medicine started out well, but then went rapidly downhill. The ultimate diagnosis was organophosphate poisoning from stolen pants. Organophosphates are always an interesting topic not just because they are present in many pesticides but because they are a potential chemical weapon.

This week, the team made the correct diagnosis in the first fifteen minutes but then spent the rest of the show trying to determine precisely which organophosphate was the culprit so that the specific antidote could be used. The problem is that while there are general treatments for organophosphate poisoning, there is not a unique treatment for each specific toxin. The show tried to explain it away as “experimental drugs used by the Army.” I hate it when medical shows start basing plots on experimental drugs; that’s when we go from the realm of plausible medicine to the realm of science fiction.

The idea that the military would have a unique antidote for each specific organophosphate is absurd. I’ve deployed to areas where we had to stock medications for organophosphate poisoning. Just the standard treatments of diazepam, 2-PAM and atropine take up a tremendous amount of space because you need multiple doses for each soldier present. Now multiply this by forty, because according to the show there are 40 different organophosphates — and just hope the enemy is nice enough to tell us which one they used, or didn’t develop one of their own.

I liked the character bits with Dr. House and Dr. Foreman, and thought the sex-starved 82 year-old lady was clever, but I hope this is the last episode we see built around “experimental medicine.”