House series 7 is available to buy now
Lisa Sanders is no ordinary doctor, one of her specialties is diagnosing the bizarre and unusual symptoms that have helped to inspire the outlandish storylines of hit TV series House - whether a patient has turned bright yellow or started suffering from seizures causing him to burst into song.
She is not technical advisor for the show and author of a bestselling book based on her columns in the New York Times Magazine. Dr Sanders spoke to us to launch the seventh series of House on Blu-Ray and DVD.
Did you always know that you wanted to be a doctor?
I never wanted to be a doctor, growing up. The people who I knew in school who wanted to go to medical school seemed boring. They spent much too much time studying and not nearly enough time enjoying life and art. It wasn't until I started covering medicine as a journalist that I saw the well rounded interesting people that (sometimes) emerge on the other side of this training process and came to appreciate how cool medicine was that I even considered becoming a doctor.
After I'd been a TV news producer for a decade or so, I thought that being a doctor would be even more fun than being a journalist. I was partially right. I did my premed work at Columbia University and then went to medical school at Yale.
How did you get in to the role of diagnosing mystery illnesses?
My column [in the New York Times] was one of those great lucky things that occasionally happen for which you must be eternally grateful. When I was in my 3rd year of medical school I went to a meeting that changed my life. The meeting was called Resident Report, it happens every day in teaching institutions, and in it - as in my columns - a single patient is presented by one doctor and all the other doctors in the room try to figure out the diagnosis. You see a version of this in House as he sits by the white board and works through a case. I didn't know that diagnosis was really a mystery waiting to be solved and that doctors were basically trained to be detectives. Once I learned that, those were the stories I told. One of the people I told many of these stories to went on to become an editor at the NY Times and he thought of these stories and called me.
What sort of strange things have you diagnosed over the years? Any real-life experiences that have stood out?
So many strange and terrible and wonderous things. The first case I wrote about in my column was a woman with Munchausen's. She almost killed herself - quite literally - to get the medical attention she craved. I recently saw a patient with a flesh eating disease that wasn't caused by a flesh eating bacteria but some crazy immune system freak out. And you have to figure this out because everything you do to heal someone with a life threatening bacteria worsens the prognosis of the patient with the immune driven flesh eating disease. I diagnosed a woman with colon cancer based on a rash she had.
How did it come about you working as a technical adviser on House?
One of the show's creators, Paul Attanasio, was a fan of my columns and thought it would make a good "procedural" television show. He contacted me after the pilot was bought and asked if I'd like to work on the show.
What sort of preparation do you have to do for the show? How much research is expected and the process of it?
The writers call me or one of the other advisers and say I have a 27 year old guy who does x or y for a living. What could he have? I love weird diseases. I subscribe to medical journals that just features case reports - where interesting, weird things are reported - and so I try to come up with something that fits this character based on what the writer wants to have happen to the poor guy. One thing about this show - it all has to be true. We can't make diseases up. So that's a challenge. But, of course in medicine, what really happens is often far more bizarre than anything you could make up.
Do you have a favourite episode of the show? Or a worst?
Nah. Can you pick a favorite child?
House Season 7 is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray now
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