Dr. House from the once-popular Television show helped a doctor solve a real-life medical mystery.
A patient who visited the Marburg University clinic in Germany back in 2012 was experiencing heart failure but did not display any signs of coronary artery disease, the Huffington Post reported.
The patient's symptoms were similar to those of a fictional character on "House." In the episode cobalt poisoning from a hip implant was causing the symptoms.
The real-world patient also had received a metal-on-plastic hip replacement; his symptoms (such as" loss of sight and hearing, hypothyroidism and fever") were similar to what the character experienced.
The patient was diagnosed and received a new hip replacement made from ceramics.
The life-saving episode number 11 of season seven, the Detroit Free Press reported.
"Cobalt intoxication has been a [well-known] cause of cardiomyopathy for over 50 years; however, it has mostly been known in the context of so-called Quebec beer drinkers' cardiomyopathy and hard steel work-related exposure to cobalt," the researchers wrote in the study," the researchers wrote in the study according to the Huffington Post.
Once the patient received his new hip his heart function improved. Cobalt is considered to be a safe and effective substance to be used in hip replacements but on rare occasions debris can cause cobalt poisoning.
"In certain situations -- false placement, technical problems in metal-on-metal prosthesis, and strikingly often after an off-label replacement of broken ceramic hips by metal parts -- cobalt exposure to the patient from a hip prosthesis occurs," they researchers wrote, the Huffington Post reported. "This cobalt intoxication is an increasingly recognized and life-threatening problem."
The doctor and "House" fan Dr. Juergen Schaefer of the Center for Undiagnosed Diseases in Marburg believes he could have solved the medical problem without the help of the show.
"We would have diagnosed this even without Dr. House," Schaefer told the Associated Press. "You could have also typed his symptoms into Google and gotten the diagnosis."
