‘House’ TV episode gives German doctor cure for mystery illness

If you're unlucky enough to be stricken with a rare medical condition, you'd better hope your doctor watches the right television show.

That was the lesson for one German man with severe heart failure and a puzzling mix of symptoms including fever, blindness, deafness and enlarged lymph nodes, which stumped doctors for months.

The 55-year-old man was diagnosed only when he was referred to Dr Juergen Schaefer, a fan of the American television medical drama House.

"After five minutes, I knew what was wrong," said Schaefer, who works at the Centre for Undiagnosed Diseases in Marburg, north of Frankfurt.

He said the man's symptoms matched up almost perfectly with a patient on an episode in which the fictional Dr Gregory House, played by British actor Hugh Laurie, identified cobalt poisoning as the cause. The series ended in 2012.

Schaefer regularly uses the television series to teach medical students. When he saw the patient with heart failure in May 2012, he had recently prepared a lecture on the show's cobalt poisoning case, where House's future mother-in-law falls ill after receiving a faulty metal hip.