Actor Hugh Laurie may have stopped playing his famous recurring role in May 2012 when the show last aired after eight seasons, but he's still giving medical help.
A team of German doctors used fictional Dr. Gregory House's deductive skills to solve a real medical mystery concerning a man with severe heart failure, they told to medical journal Lancet.
The unidentified 55-year-old patient in question was experiencing symptoms including fever, swollen lymph nodes, hearing and vision loss when he first came to doctors for help at the Center for Undiagnosed Diseases in Marburg, reports the Detroit Free Press.
Luckily these German doctors were "House" fans and even trained medical students using past episodes.
The name of the life-saving episode was called "Family Practice," and involved a patient, played by Candice Bergen, who also was suffering from strange symptoms, including fever and heart distress.
The German doctors also noted in their case report, according to the Detroit Free Press, that in the episode, cobalt poisoning due to a metal hip implant caused the mysterious symptoms. This led the real life doctors to make the same conclusion in the case of their patient, who had undergone a hip replacement in 2010.
The doctors write a detailed description of their findings in the official report.
"We suspected cobalt intoxication as the most likely reason," they said.
They also discovered cobalt fragments near one hip and high levels in the blood. They concluded that fragments of the patient's old ceramic hip had damaged his new metal hip.
The original story, posted in USA Today, states that the man "stabilized and recovered slightly." Unfortunately, doctors say that he did not regain much of his hearing or sight.
One doctor, Jeurgen Schaefer, in an interview with the Associated Press, downplayed how much 'House' actually contributed to their diagnosis.
"You could have also typed his symptoms into Google and gotten the diagnosis," he said.
