American hospital fiction can be a good teaching for physicians. Juergen Schaefer, doctor at the University Clinic in Marburg, Germany, has just experienced this. An episode of the famous Dr. House series, a doctor with unorthodox methods, was of great help to him as he dried up on a patient’s case.
It all starts when a 55-year-old man presents for consultations for symptoms without a noticeable cause. This German suffered from severe heart failure, fever, visual and hearing impairment, and inflammation of the esophagus. These pains appeared all the more mysterious as the patient had no medical history.
Cobalt poisoning
By dint of racking his brains, the doctor recalled an episode of the Dr. House series in which a patient had similar symptoms due to cobalt poisoning. “Looking for a cause combining all these symptoms and remembering an episode of the Dr House TV series that we had used as educational material for medical students, we suspected cobalt poisoning”, explains the professor. in the medical journal The Lancet.
Looking more closely at the medical records, he discovers that his patient has had two hip prostheses fitted. Over the course of his investigations, he understands that it is the replacement of a broken prosthesis by a metal prosthesis that has caused all these health concerns for the patient.
Guided by Dr House, the doctor got it right: metal debris in the hip was revealed by x-ray and blood and urine tests confirmed poisoning with cobalt and chromium, two metals used in the prosthesis. .
The story ended well as the prosthesis that caused this “poisoning” was changed, and the patient’s heart problems gradually subsided. “Well-executed entertainment is not only capable of entertaining and educating but also of saving lives,” concludes Dr Schaefer, quoted by AFP.
