Generic House episode

:Patient: Hey! There's something wrong with me that lands me in the hospital!
:House/Doctors: Ah yes, looks like it was this. Take these and we'll monitor you for a few days.
:Patient: Oh no, it got worse!
:Doctors: It's okay, we're pretty sure we know what it is.
:House: Nope, you're all wrong, it's this.
:Patient Cured.
Generic is the nTH season episode of House which airs every time the series is aired anywhere on the planet, particularly on Amazon Prime.
This article is intended to be entirely humorous, but, of course, in satire there is truth. Please feel free to enjoy it if you don't have the time to read every article. Also, please feel free to add to it.
House and his team are assigned a patient with a mysterious illness that has stumped the rest of the doctors at the hospital. However, the patient is hiding a deep and mysterious secret that they are too embarrassed to talk about.
Meanwhile, following the events in the previous episode, House and Wilson explore the possibilities of having a relationship with one of the hot babes that are constantly coming into their lives, only to to find themselves pining for past loves.
The episode explores the balancing of medical ethics with the realities of dealing with severely ill patients, while at the same time developing House's character (in the sense of doing dramatic character development and holding out hope that House can redeem himself). However, all the other characters continue to be developed as stereotypes, particularly Foreman as the rage-filled young black man.
==Recap==
We open in a place we've never seen before watching two people we don't recognize who are engaging in an intensely physical activity. We're not entirely sure we haven't accidentally tuned into Law & Order. However, one of the people starts to look a little tired, but merely sits down, only to have the other, who was fine just a moment ago, collapse in a heap on the floor after having a seizure.
The patient is taken to Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, which is apparently at a temporal nexus of every known disease in the universe. The emergency room rules out everything it could be, but the patient continues to get worse.
Cuddy brings the case to House. House makes his standard sexist remark about her low cut frock and how big her buttocks are. He starts reeling off diagnoses, which Cuddy soon shoots down as having been tested for already in the ER. House is still uninterested until Cuddy mentions that along with the seizures, the patient has a rash that looks like poison ivy. He grabs the file and goes to see his team.
House presents the case to the team and insists on calling the patient "Gym Seizure Chap" even though his name is Michael John. Cameron thinks it's an infection. Foreman thinks its Lupus. Taub thinks it is rhabdomyolysis. Thirteen thinks it is Parkinson's disease. Kutner thinks it is poison ivy. Masters thinks it is Vicodin abuse. Adams thinks it's mastocytosis. Park thinks it is eosinophilic pneumonia. House thinks it is an atypical presentation of an autoimmune disorder like vasculitis and orders steroids. Chase agrees with him. Foreman is vexed and points out that giving a patient steroids when they have an infection will kill them. House orders the steroids anyway and tells Foreman and Chase to do an environmental scan. Cameron gives the patient steroids and bonds with the patient.
House goes to see Wilson about his woman problems. It really doesn't matter who has the woman problems at this point, only that one of them does. Wilson talks about going back to his third wife, but House reminds him that she's invisible. House talks about going back to Dominika, but Wilson reminds him she's a legal immigrant now and doesn't need him.
Foreman and Chase do the environmental scan but find nothing more harmful than moldy bread in the refrigerator. Foreman is vexed that he has wasted all this time.
House goes to talk to Wilson about something totally unrelated, like how Wilson is planning on going back to his second wife. House reminds him that she was jealous of their relationship. House talks about going back to Ali, but Wilson reminds him she's dating Luke Palmeiro now. House then gets an idea and returns to the conference room.
Foreman, Cameron and Masters go to Cuddy and tell her that House is giving a patient steroids without confirming the autoimmune condition. Cuddy confronts House and tells him he can't just give people medicine on a hunch. She goes to stop the steroids, only to find the patient improving.
However, an hour later, the symptoms are worse than ever, the patient is bleeding from the rash, and the patient's toes are turning green. The Patient then crashes. House admits it isn't an autoimmune condition and stops the steroids.
The patient stabilizes, but they are back to square one. House spends hours of seemingly valuable time throwing the B.O.U.O. against a wall, doing a trick of some form involving his cane and filling out the soccer pools until he remembers something from an obscure medical journal published only in Togo in Hungarian how green toes can be caused by lesions in the brain. He orders an MRI.
House goes to talk to Wilson. Wilson is thinking of going back to Amber Volakis, but House reminds him that she's dead. House tells Wilson he's thinking of going back to Cuddy, but Wilson reminds him that the producers couldn't afford to bring her back for the eighth season.
The team does the MRI on the patient's brain. While performing the MRI, Foreman is vexed about the progress of his career, Cameron wonders if House is taking too much Vicodin, Chase hits on a nurse, Taub says he's stopped hitting on nurses, Thirteen wonders if she should be hitting on the nurse who doesn't seem to be into Chase, Kutner talks about the costume he's wearing to the upcoming comic book convention, and Masters spots something on the MRI. Park and Adams get into an argument about whether universal health care is a good thing. They don't find any lesions, but they spot that the patient's brain shows signs of inflammation. Foreman reports the result to House, ane he's vexed because he was right in the first place about the infection. House asks why the patient doesn't have a fever. Foreman puts the patient on antibiotics anyway.
House goes to eat Wilson's bag lunch of steak and ale pie with a Guinness and spotted dick, mistaking it for the baloney sandwich he packed. Wilson comes into complain and talks about going back to his first wife. House reminds him he tried that already. House talks about going back to Lydia, but Wilson reminds him that he hates kids and Lydia won't give her's up. House and Wilson talk about the patient but can't come up with any ideas. Cuddy tells him to go do his clinic duty.
After rushing back from the clinic, House tells the team that he thinks the patient has a disease he can only have contracted if he spent ten years in the Himalayas - Tibetan Llama Parasites. He makes a metaphor comparing the parasites to someone embezzling money from their employer. The treatment for it is dangerous if he doesn't have the disease. The patient denies ever having been in the Himalayas and refuses the treatment. House then makes a metaphor comparing the disease to an Austin Mini and Tibetan Llama Parasites to popes, declaring that you would have to take the hats off a pope to fit him into the Mini. The patient's relative punches House for mocking popes. Then House asks if the patient or the relatives have had an affair. They both lie and then House pulls down the patient's pants and finds Tibetan Llama Rash, a horrible rash between the buttocks caused by having an affair with someone. The patient still refuses treatment.
House goes back to his office and Chase comes in to commiserate. Offhand, Chase mentions that he saw a stuffed Yeti in the patient's house. House goes to confront the patient, who admits to being in the Himalayas after all. He lied about it so he wouldn't have to talk to Cameron about her experience with Buddhism. They start the treatment and the patient recovers. Foreman is vexed that he didn't see the answer sooner.
House and Wilson go to the monster truck rally after work. At the rally, Wilson wonders what Nora is doing and House reminds him that she moved to another city to work as a forensic examiner.
==Clinic Patient==
House tells the clinic patient that although he only has a cold, he should really have someone audit the books of his business as the woman with the red hair in his office is embezzling. Suddenly he thinks of something completely unrelated to whatever is happening and limps out of the clinic, making sure to do a dramatic stare first. This something explains everything everytime, without exception.
==Major Events==
*House pops a Vicodin without even trying to hide it!
*House eats a Reuben sandwich.
*Chase tries to sleep with Cameron, Thirteen, Adams, and Amber, but winds up playing cribbage with Park's grandmother Popo.
*Cameron puts her lab coat over her chair.
*Foreman gets vexed when House refers to his African-American ancestry, when House orders a treatment he disagrees with and when House gets the answer before he does.
*Adams buys something expensive.
*Park takes a position that's so right wing that Donald Trump would apologize if he ever suggested it (like being in favour of child labor).
*Taub has an affair with a woman who is much younger than he is, and Thirteen has a much shorter affair with a woman who as just as hot as she is.
*Masters wears a skirt with a hemline that Cuddy would reject as "too slutty".
*Wilson's lunch gets stolen by person or persons unknown.
*House uses a metaphor.
*Cuddy tells House to finish his paperwork, and later tells him that he can't perform the procedure he wants to perform without doing more tests.
==Title==
The title refers to a non-name brand version of a name brand product. In pharmacology, the generic is chemically identical to the name brand drug.
==Trivia and Cultural References==
*Obscure reference to Sherlock Holmes without actually mentioning him.
*Sexist remark about Salma Hayek.
*Obligatory poking of Bryan Singer by giving a spoiler to The Usual Suspects.
*Reference to another television show or movie that the actor appeared in.
*Note that House's obsession about the case is just like the plot of Moby-Dick.
*Eclectic choice of music for the soundtrack, usually chosen and/or performed by Hugh Laurie.
*A claim that Lisa Cuddy is a transsexual because Lisa Edelstein played one in Ally McBeal.
*Offhand reference to the state of New Jersey, even though the entire series after the Pilot was filmed in California.
*House makes the 847th reference to a Monty Python sketch.
==Zebra Factor 11/10==
Tibetan Llama Parasites don't even exist! However, this usually is no reason to exclude them as a diagnosis. After all, it's not like the first time they've moved symptoms and diseases around to fit plot points.
==Music==
*Teardrop by Massive Attack
*Something jazzy by Hugh Laurie
*You can't always get what you want by some obscure British rock band like "The Who" or something.
*Closing theme by Jon Ehrlich, Jason Derlatka and Leigh Roberts
==Reviews==
Reviews of this episode were uniformly positive, except for those that weren't. One critic complained "It was about as formulaic as an episode of 'Scooby Doo' and they even had the guy who played Shaggy in the movie". Polite Dissent noted that it was pointless to make up an imaginary disease when they could have used a real disease, Peruvian Yak Syndrome, with the exact same symptoms. However, critics raved about the performance of Omar Epps who was described as "not as wooden as usual" and really liked Chase's hair.
*TV.com users rated the episode a 3.14159 and voted the Inanimate Carbon Rod as the Most Valuable Performer
*IMDB users rated the episode a 10.1. It did best with hackers paid to screw with the rating (15.7) and worst with Kazakh poets (2-4-6-8 who do we appreciate!)
==Medical Ethics==
===Diagnostic Trials===
A diagnostic trial is where you guess what disease the patient might have, convince them to have the treatment, and hope they get better. House uses them all the time but gets his fellows to get the "consent to treatment" so when the patient suffers an adverse reaction he can shift the blame to them because he never puts entries in a chart. This is really unethical because it affects the patient, his subordinates, his supervisor and the whole hospital. However, one of the benefits is that doctors don't have to refer to complicated texts like Conn's Current Therapy, which is expensive and you need a new one every year for cryin' out loud. You just say "shove 'em full of cyclophosphamide and prednisone and let's see what happens".
===Lying to Colleagues===
Sometimes, your colleagues will be concerned about you but you just want to get them off your back. Short of punching your boss, usually lying to them is the best way to go. However, you have to be prepared. House knows this all too well and when he has to lie to his mother he always has back-up documentation. However, this is not usually necessary as long as you keep your wits about you. For example, if you're making up a name, you should have one on the tip of your tongue that isn't too common. If you say that you were with a "John Smith" that's a dead giveaway, but you can't use something really obscure either.
===Prescribing Drugs===
Pharmaceutical companies will go to great lengths to try to sell their expensive brand-name drugs. However, they can't sell drugs directly to consumers so instead they sweet talk doctors into prescribing their drugs even though an identical drug is cheaper. Despite all of House's fancy talk at Vogler's conference, House himself uses the brand-name version of hydrocodone/paracetamol (probably because the producers get a kickback). In order to influence physicians, companies hire pharmaceutical reps that will go to any length with a doctor, even sleeping with Eric Foreman. They also throw lavish weekend "conferences" with all-you-can-eat buffets.
===Protecting Patient Confidentiality===
Diagnoses and treatment regimens are strictly a matter between the patient and hospital personnel. As such, it's hard to believe that this show always identifies their patients by name, sometime by first and last name and, on several occasions, by their middle name too! You would think they would bleep out the name every time the fellows mentioned it so we wouldn't know who it was. At least House knows enough to come up with aliases like "Hot OTB Babe" or "Teenage Supermodel" or "Carmen Electra". Mind you, they did use aliases when they didn't know the name of the patient like "Jane Doe" or "Mr. X".
===Pain Management===
Narcotics are really, really dangerous. Dozens of people die from narcotics overdoses every day. Not only that, they can really do a number on your liver. However, if the person in pain is your BFF, you should probably give them an open prescription so they won't be upset about their ex-girlfriend going back to their husband or their current girlfriend dumping them because they used narcotics when they said they wouldn't. Also, lie to the police about it when your friend scams even more narcotics from you.
===Ruling out Lupus===
Okay, so Lupus is a really uncommon disease but hear me out - if your a patient without a definitive diagnosis, what's the harm in looking for Lupus. I mean, it's only a lousy ANA test. How long could it take? How much could it cost? I mean, if the patient has a normal ANA count, you know right away because it shows a negative at the first titre. I bet Cameron can do one in about an hour. Probably less. I mean, when Cate Milton wouldn't run one of those diagnostic trials (see above) because she was "concerned about her patients" because she had a limited supply of steroids being at the South Pole and everything, she had to run a crappy LE prep and she got an answer within a few hours using a test tube and a paperclip. Besides, if they had run an ANA on Spencer, that would have shown she had Sjögren's syndrome. I mean, it's not lupus, but its like you get two birds with one stone.
==Goofs==
*A refrigerator is a lousy place to keep bread. Although it is commonly believed that it will keep the bread fresher longer, it actually accelerates the chemical reactions that lead to the bread going stale.
*You know, they could have cast Felicia Day as Cameron. That would have been much better.
*Not casting Felicia Day as Masters either. Day got a full scholarship to the University of Texas, did a double major in math and music, and was class valedictorian.
*Killing off Kutner.
*Not killing off Amber sooner so she could appear as a hallucination more.
*Wilson getting married three times and trying to marry his first wife for a second time.
*Hugh Laurie's father was a doctor. So was Lisa Edelstein's. Not only was Jesse Spencer's father a doctor, but so are his three siblings. What a bunch of losers because Hugh Laurie made more in one episode of Season 8 pretending to be a doctor than his father did in his entire life!
*Paying Jennifer Morrison for most of Season 6 instead of saving the money and using it to pay Lisa Edelstein for Season 8.
*Poor character development of the supporting characters.
*Wilson's shirt collar switches between in and out of his jacket eight times in one scene.
==Quotes==
:Chase: House, we need to cure this patient. He is very sick.
:House: Did you try the medicine drug?
:Chase: I did try the medicine drug.
:House: Only stupid people try the medicine drug. You are stupid.
:Patient: I would rather not be sick.
:House: You are stupid too. Did you take stupid drug?
:Foreman: I gave patient stupid drug.
:House: You are a black man.
:Foreman: This vexes me.
:Patient: I have blood from my nose that is dripping.
:Cameron: That's bad!
:Patient: Also I was bitten by mice due to my poor hygiene.
:Cuddy: You need hygiene drug. Also, I have not spoken in awhile.
:House: No! Hygiene drug will kill Patient! He needs mouse bites to live!
:Chase: [Shocked]
:Cameron: [Shocked]
:Foreman: [Vexed]
:House: More mouse bites!
:Cuddy: I forbid this.
:House: Don't care.
:Chase: [Gets mice]
:House: [Makes mouse bite serum]
:Patient: I feel better. No more nose blood! Thank you doctor!
:House: I am very smart.
:Wilson: I, too, am in this episode.
:Foreman: This vexes me. Source
:Masters: We need to get a Chest CT.
:Foreman: Excuse me I'm the senior team member. Which means we don't need anything unless I say we need to.
:Taub: [to a nurse] Do you want to have an affair?
:Chase: [to the same nurse] Do you want to have a threesome?
:Masters: You can't talk to her like that! I'm telling Cuddy. [Masters leaves]
:Foreman: We need a Chest CT.
:Taub & Chase: Get it yourself!
:House: Can you say "Crikey Mate"?
:Chase: Crikey Mate.
:House: Perfect. Now, no matter what I say, you'll agree with me, okay?
:Chase: Okay.
:House: Nicely done. You, disagree with everything I say.
:Foreman: Sorry, not understand.
:House: Close enough. You, get morally outraged by everything I say.
:Cameron: That's permanent marker, you know.
:House: Wow, you guys are good.
==Cast==
*Obscure British comic actor as Grumpy old doctor
*Former party girl as The head honcho
*Talented African-American actor as Grumpy young doctor
*Established Broadway actor as All-American boy
*Former supermodel as Doctor who looks like former supermodel
*Hunky Australian guy as Himbo doctor
*Short Jewish guy as Short Jewish doctor
*Current supermodel as Hot, smart doctor
*Funny Indian guy as Reckless doctor
*Former high fashion model as Old money doctor
*Quirky Asian woman as Character who actually resembles real doctor
*Popular actress being stunt-cast as Student who wears really short skirts
*Actual registered nurse as Nurse
*Jerry Mathers as The Beaver
==Release Dates==
*Alpha Centauri - 2008 C.E.
*Large Magellanic Cloud - 32,004 C.E.
*Andromeda Galaxy - 1,502,004 C.E.
*Edge of observable universe - 13,000,002,004 C.E. (+- 200,000 years)
==In Other Languages==
*French - Maison générique épisode (Eng. Episode generic house)
*Spanish - Casa episodio genérica (direct translation)
*German - Generisches Haus Episode (direct translation)
*Esperanto - Generic House epizodo (direct translation)
*Latin - Buy Domus Episode (Eng. Buy House episode [only $0.99 US on Amazon!])
*Chinese - 通用满屋插曲 (Eng. Universal House episode)
*Japanese - 一般的なハウスエピソード (kanji) - Ippantekina hausuepisōdo (English transliteration) (Eng. General House episode)
*Dutch - Generieke House-aflevering (direct translation)
*Korean - 일반 주택의 에피소드 (hangul) - ilban jutaeg-ui episodeu (English transliteration) (Eng. General episodes of House)
*Klingon - generic tuq-episode-
==Links==
*The one with a generic name for a dentist
*The vast majority of House, M.D. episodes at Reddit
*The one that mentions the manufacturer of generic Vicodin
*The one where House plugs the patient's face onto a generic Marine he saw in a dream
*On the benefits of chemotherapy and defibrillation as a cure for every patient
*Oh sure, prescribe the expensive brand name for the patient instead of the cheaper generic
*Generic respect for life versus brand name respect for life
*How to use generic patient names to protect patient confidentiality
*A much better generic House episode
==Videos==
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It's a TV show... Duh! Not a documentary.
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