I haven't been posting my analyses for Season 5 for two reasons. First, I haven't been able to find transcripts. Second, the medicine has gotten so confusing that sometimes I'm not even sure what the final diagnosis is. Here is a breakdown of diagnoses for the first six episodes of Season 5, but this doesn't include points. Sorry. I hope I can go back to analysis one day, but in the meantime I'm grateful to Scott at Polite Dissent for posting medical reviews of the show. What follows is pretty much cribbed from him, and the Fox recaps.

5.01 Dying Changes Everything
Initial Symptoms: Woman with hallucinations, abdominal pain, anemia, bradycardia, memory loss
Diagnosis: Ectopic pregnancy (House) + lepromatous leprosy (House)

Notes: How could the team have missed the ectopic pregnancy? Kutner should lose a point for that.
Foreman should lose a point for giving the patient chemotherapy which would have killed her if House hadn't diagnosed her infection in time.
Someone suggested she had an infection picked up while traveling, which was the case.


5.02 Not Cancer
Initial symptoms: Two patients who received organs from the same donor. Four other patients who received organs from this donor had died.
Diagnosis: Cancer stem cells from the donor (House)

Notes: The team was trying to save two patients. One died before the diagnosis was made, and one was saved.
I couldn't make any sense at all out of Kutner's intestinal perforation theory, and neither could the physician who writes the medical reviews.
At the beginning they said no blood is transmitted in a corneal transplant, so how did the cornea transplant receipient get the donor's cancer cells in her brain?


5.03 Adverse Events
Initial Symptoms: Man with visual agnosia
Diagnosis: Experimental drug interactions (House) + bezoar (House)

Notes: House deduced that the patient was in different experimental drug trials. I think he also figured out that the patient had a bezoar but I don't remember.
Taub earns a point for confirming from the patient's old paintings that the patient's symptoms are caused by drug interactions.


5.04 Birthmarks
Initial Symptoms: Woman with abdominal pain + vomiting blood
Diagnosis: Pins in patient's brain (House + Wilson)

Notes: I'm attributing the final diagnosis to both House and Wilson because House's diagnosis followed from Wilson's realization that the patient's parents tried to kill her when she was born.
I'm really uncertain about what caused the patient's symptoms here. At first House suggested that she had iron overload, but in the end it was all attributed to the pins in her brain. Was it one or the other? Or both? I think we're supposed to believe it was just the pins, that's how the Fox recap reads, but that shouldn't have caused all those symptoms.


5.05 Lucky Thirteen
Initial Symptoms: Woman with tonic clonic seizure, severe fatigue, history of retinal vein occlusion
Diagnosis: Sjogren's Syndrome (House)

Notes: I really had a problem with House's behaviour this episode. I thought he was torturing the patient for fun.
Why would the lung cysts have smooth muscle cells in them?


5.06 Joy
Initial Symptoms: Man with blackouts + hallucinations
Diagnosis: Familial Mediterranean Fever (House)

Notes: House deduced that the patient's daughter suffered the same illness as he did, so this case counts as two patients.
The symptoms don't match the diagnosis at all.
Cuddy met with a woman whose unborn baby she wanted to adopt. With Cameron's help she ended up diagnosing the unborn baby with underdeveloped lungs and the mother with placental abruption. This isn't part of the analysis because it wasn't House's team working on the case, but still worthy of note.

Labels: Season 5