As a medical student, I used to enjoy the Fox show House M.D.—or at least, the first 20 minutes of the hourlong episodes. Each week, the cynical genius Dr. Gregory House would take on one new case, each seemingly more bizarre than the last. Early in the episode, House and his team would sit around a table kicking around the details of whatever mysterious ailment was afflicting their latest patient. They’d generated the so-called differential diagnosis, a list of possible conditions that should have included the real culprit. Their differential diagnosis was especially useful for a medical student because it was usually a reasonably accurate and inclusive list of the conditions that the patient ought to have had, were it not a fictional TV show. So, it was not only a good way to review, it was also inspiring to see these fantasy docs rattle off all the conditions that I was trying to wrap my mind around.
From there, the doctors would perform a series of tests in order to distinguish which among the candidate conditions was the likely culprit, with the goal of eventually arriving at the one definitive diagnosis. Of course, this was Hollywood and things were never so simple.
