The Pain of House
I am a pop-culture junkie. If you have been playing along at home long enough this is common knowledge. I have been a big fan of House, M.D. since it’s poorly lit pilot. I am simultaneously appalled and amused by his crass behavior. Even the best feminist in me laughs and fairly inappropriate moments.
I have seen and read plenty of critques concerning Dr. House and his manner. I have chewed out my share of doctors for acting like him as if it makes them seem clever. He is a character that is worth critiquing on many levels and for many reasons from many points of view.
What I haven’t seen is a lot of criticism of the characters assembled around House. From Dr. Wilson, or Dr. Cuddy, or the myriad staff members he has had around him (yes, even Dr. Cameron-Chase) I have watched for nigh on five seasons now as all of the people who claim to care about him have done little more than chastize and concern troll his life. Most notably, his addiction to Vicodin and his chosen method of pain management.
A repeated theme through out the series has been watching person after person in House’s life try to trick or otherwise convince him that he should quit taking Vicodin and learn how to deal with his pain. The constantly badger him about his addiction, and will go to great lengths to get him to quit taking his pain medication.
Only a person who has never experienced chronic pain would dare criticize a person for their pain management.
Because, like it or not, Dr. Gregory House is managing his pain. Sure, he is an addict. There is little argument there. The character admits it freely. In his own words he says that he takes a lot of pills because he is in a lot of pain. Whatever your feelings on narcotic medication it is a proven method for making intense and chronic pain managable, and a down side to that is that narcotic drugs can in fact be dependency and/or addiction forming. The presence of an addiction does not take away the fact that the pain beneath it is real. When a doctor and a patient together decide to pursue pain management via narcotics such as Vicodin they will weight the pros and cons of such treatment. One of the cons that is weighed is the fact that a person can develop an addiction to a drug, and a tolerance that will probably mean their intake will increase over time. As with any course of treatment the costs must be weighed with the benefits.
House is able to function as a result of the Vicodin to which he has become addicted. He is able to be independent in moving and living, not housebound (no pun intended) by his pain. He is able to hold down his job and do it with the skill through which he receives his notoriety. His course of pain management gives him a life and independece that many of us living with pain or other disabilities are hoping to achieve. It might not make him a happy ray of sunshine all the time, but neither does living in agonizing pain all of the time.
It is very condescending for a person who is not living in pain to assume that they know better than that person how to manager hir pain. The way that I see House’s collegues and the people who could pass for his friends treat him over his addiction and the way he manages his pain strikes too close to the way I feel most doctors and friends of those of us living in chronic pain will treat us.
Criticize the way he behaves to his subordinates. Criticize the way he treats those closest to him. But if you don’t know what it is like to live with chronic pain, don’t criticize his decisions as to how he manages his pain. If it’s not your body, frankly, it’s not your business.
There is an episode in the first or second season where he detoxes off of it and admits he’s dependent. They all get excited but then he reports that dependent does not mean addicted and that he can still work and HE is happy with his life so he does not have a problem. The issue comes from people not liking WHO he is and the constant search for a reason.
Would I want House as my GP, no. Would I care what he was like if I was in critical condition, probably not.
I think the show has declined in quality recently, mostly because of the way they have handled both Foreman and Kutner’s characters as well as 13 and Cuddy. They have created them as concern trolls (awesome analogy) and people designed to fill in the negative space around House as opposed to complex characters.
Yup, I know those episodes. And, you are right. They have turned the dynamic into all this concern for his addiction, NOT his pain, even if they disguise it by saying they care about his pain. And that frustrates me beyond belief.
I think the thing I like about House is that he isn’t all cuddly and inspirational and brave, or whatever other trope people like to throw at people who are differently abled. He’s a cranky jerk (possibly the only well developed character other than Chase and Cameron, who I think are) who deals with pain, and the flaw, IMNSHO, is that those people feel free, even as doctors, to object to his care choices. They can’t get past that he is happy that way, that his addiction, which doesn’t affect them, is their problem, not his.
Thank you for this. I’ll have to show it to my mom also. We both have chronic pain and how the other character’s treat House’s chosen method of pain management annoys the hell out of both of us.
I used to have to take psych meds every day and now I’m finally stable enough to be off them, but I do have a pain killer – Darvocet- as a PRN for my fibror. I could go back on something like Cymbalta (an antidepressant that helps with joint pain), which is non-habit forming, yet ironically, if I did that, then I would be taking it everyday, whereas with the pain killer, I get to decide when I take the medicine. People like to tell me which medicine is better for me to take and I really wish though that they would just let me and my doctor decide!
My most recent Rheum (whom I am no longer seeing since we moved) beat me w/ the “if you want to get better you will take Lyrica”. He doesn’t prescribe narcotics unless you do, and I wasn’t his patient long enough to earn that privilege.
I am bad at taking a daily pill (it’s one reason I don’t use the Pill for BC), but I can take a pill when I hurt. It’s not hard (and for the record, I would take the Lyrica again because I wan’t on it long enough to know if it helped). Even my anti-convulsant, which keeps my headaches at bay, is hard for me to remember.
The point is that the stigma surrounding narcotics keeps people from taking them (I don’t want to be called a drug seeker), and keeps doctors from making reasonable choices in prescribing them.
One of the interesting things about House is that while it’s very clear that he is not to be taken as an admirable behavior, the characters around him are actually engaging in acts that are objectionable for the very seem reasons. House doesn’t respect patients’ choices; his friends and co-workers don’t respect his.
After Kutner’s suicide, people are outraged by his failure to respect other people’s grief, but no one respects that trying to figure out what happened is his way of grieving.
That is a good point. I kind of just saw them acting like people do after someone experiences loss…it’s like you need to hurry up and heal so they can move on too.
One thing that stood out w/ me is when Wilson tricks House into taking anti-depressants to prove that he needs them (which I don’t think anyone should be forced if they don’t want to because of the high number of side effects that can occur). Granted, House doped Wilson w/ ritalin, but it is clear that he did it to be an ass, not a preachy and paternalistic concern troll.