Afraid to Ask Your Doctor About Lupus? Then Watch Any Episode of House M.D.
Shelly from Los Manteles, TX writes to The Satirical Post's health advisor Gregor Wolfowitz.
“Salutations Gregor. What is lupus?”
Thank you, Shelly. Your question gives me the chance to address this supposed disease head on. Lupus is not a real illness. The fictional condition was introduced in the hit 2004 medical drama ‘House’.
Lupus is what storytellers would call a plot device. At the start of every medical mystery, Doctor Gregory House, played by the sensational Hugh Laurie, believes a patient is suffering from lupus.
In the end, the life saving diagnosis was never lupus. Of course, the one time Dr. House overlooked “lupus”, the patient did in fact have the illness.
In a 2015 interview in The Delaware Journal of Televised Medicine, ‘House’ creator David Shore debunked lupus as a plot device: “It [lupus] is not real, no. So often in life, we make the wrong first impression, we jump to judgment.”
"That’s what lupus represents in the show. Lupus is about the second look we deserve to give one another. Even a brilliant diagnostician like Dr. House gets it wrong on first glance, and he always gets it wrong with lupus. That was pretty much the only rule in the writer’s room,” added Mr. Shore.
To learn more from health advisor Gregor Wolfowitz visit our HEALTH page.
