“It’s not lupus, it’s never lupus!” says Gregory House in an episode of the hit TV series HOUSE, MD – it was a line that made fun of the fact that the diagnostic team the show focuses on always mentions lupus as the patient’s possible medical condition, a diagnosis you have has been proven wrong over and over again. The line was of course an instant sensation among fans of the show and the fact that there is an actual webpage, one that has a YouTube video showing all the times the team had diagnosed a lupus patient embedded in she, is proof of that. Since the utterance of that line, “It’s Never Lupus” has had so many people quoting it and putting it on t-shirts that even people who don’t actually watch the show have gotten to know it.
One thing some people have begun to wonder is why the show’s writers favored mentioning lupus over all other possible diseases. Is lupus really that common? Or, perhaps the better question should be “Is lupus really that interesting?” After all, most of an episode of HOUSE, MD focuses primarily on unusual patient conditions and the diagnostic team’s race against time to figure out what’s wrong with patients so they can get them the right treatment. Given that little tidbit, it wouldn’t be too hard to imagine that lupus gets written into the script a lot because of all the possibilities for medical setbacks the diagnosis could bring.
Having said that, perhaps it should be noted that the writers at HOUSE, MD should be considered smart for using lupus as a “throwaway” diagnosis in many cases. Why do you ask? Because the reasoning is, however, entirely plausible even if the all-powerful and all-knowing Gregory House proves them wrong in the end. After all, lupus creates so many complications that it could explain some of the symptoms the patients presented on the show, and the creepy thing is that there are actual medical cases that the HOUSE, MD cases are based on (but don’t go into that). in that).
The point to be made here is that lupus causes so many other health problems that one has to wonder why it does NOT become a standard part of the diagnostic process in the really rare and potentially fatal cases that might actually be encountered. Lupus is an autoimmune disease, which in simple terms means that the body attacks and destroys its own tissues and cells because it can’t understand the difference between those and the “foreign” materials that make us sick. Your joints, your heart, your lungs, your kidneys, your skin, and even your brain are attacked by your immune system when you have lupus, and it’s inevitable that at some point, when it gets too much, your body can start to shut down too.
Because it is a disease that affects the immune system, some people believe that lupus is a blood disorder (because white blood cells are an essential component of the immune system). This is a wrong assumption: lupus is not itself a blood problem; however, lupus CAUSES several blood disorders because it also attacks blood cells; Of course, these blood disorders help determine the approach to treating lupus. Because of this, blood experts turn to it when a case of lupus is discovered, possibly explaining why some people are so sure lupus is a blood disorder when, in fact, it just causes blood problems like too much clotting of the blood (thrombosis), and low levels of red blood cells and hemoglobin (anaemia).
Yes, everyone should be able to understand the irony that our own “anti-disease” system is an actual cause of disease, one of the things that makes lupus such an interesting condition to ponder. It doesn’t matter anymore if you knew a lot about it before it was constantly mentioned in HOUSE, MD. In the end, lupus has become a part of popular culture consciousness and more people have become aware of it.
One last thing: while many people hoped that “the condition” that changes in each episode was never lupus, an episode in the current season ended with a patient who actually HAD lupus, prompting Gregory House to say “I finally have a case of lupus.” So while some of you may have started to think that in real life, “it’s never lupus,” remember that even on the show that coined the phrase, lupus does happen.