You do have to be careful of the dosage you take, as well as what other meds you take with it and you can not drink alcohol. But – if you know what you are doing – you won’t have any trouble. I think it was stupid for them to make House stop breathing like that. That makes him seem stupid – because he is a very intellegient dr – and for him to stop breathing – he would of had to take another medication with it that causes the breathing to slow (example would be benzos such as valium, xanax, etc.). House wouldn’t be that stupid.

Now House wasn’t doing it to get off pain meds – he was doing it for pain. It totally stopped the pain. This could happen – as methadone is a lot stronger that what he was taking. Also, I can’t figure out why he is only taking Vicodin ES. This is 7.5 mg. He takes more than one at a time. A Dr would prescribe Norco’s instead if they were to prescribe the Vicodin family of narcotics. Norco is a 10mg pill with 325 mg of tylenol in it. Regular Vicodin tends to have bunches of tylenol in them – this effects the kidneys and liver. That is why some dr’s change to Norcos and sadly to Oxycontin.

With House and the writers and dr’s on the show being so intelligent and finding cures for most all of their cases, they take a dumb and not very bright approach to this subject. Do your homework before you do another show with a narcotic such as Methadone. I was very disappointed.

In the LaLa Land of this program, nobody ever worries about the costs rung by countless tests, invasive procedures, and snap ordering of various drugs. Not one peep when unnecessary surgeries are performed. Ethics issues arise when the hospital administrator claims reputation damage from Dr Foreman’s lapse in giving Thirteen the test drug, but nobody bats an eye when one or more team members breaks into the patients home to ‘investigate’. Never is the patient asked permission.

A perpetually annoying aspect is that an entire team is assigned to work with just 1 or 2 patients at a time. Equally disturbing is the fact that the team is shown constantly performing mundane nursing actions for the central character patient in each episode, which we know is never done by any doctor, let alone by many nurses in a busy ER ward.

Now wouldn’t it be interesting if the cast were to face a real time crisis, say…a mobbed ER waiting room full of sick patients, many or most of whom are suffering from this pandemic influenza. Contrast the dilemma of a harried and short-handed staff trying to sort through who is to be treated and whom to send home.

That is what our hospitals are facing presently. And the situation is going to get worse, much worse, in the next 60-90 days.

Anyway, I loved the mundane, “you two are idiots” solution to this one.

And I’m a little curious about narcotics now. I’ve heard that heroin addicts can have their dependency managed with maintenance doses of heroin (or morphine, or whatever). While I realize this kind of thing is presently impossible (or at least extremely difficult) in the United States (due to the DEA’s ridiculous scheduling policies and the concomitant difficulty of obtaining controlled doses under medical supervision, not to mention the puritanical attitudes of Americans toward drug addiction in general, best exemplified on House by Tritter), I’m now wondering if in fact heroin itself might be a better tool for helping heroin addicts to function than methadone is. Scott mentioned the increased risk of respiratory depression from methadone (while also saying that this was overstated by the show), but then again, methadone lasts longer (if I remember correctly).

So what do you guys think? Could heroin clinics be safer than methadone clinics?

I don’t think that what the writters were attempting to portray was that House “needs” pain to be brilliant, rather that his pain being controlled allowed him to achieve a more laid back attitude which caused him to overlook certain details which would have been relevant to the case at hand.

Stacy specifically stated that House was pretty much the same before his infarction, so it’s not really about the “Pain” rather the altered behavioral patterns that were produced from the initial shock of the new pain treatment.

House has been consistently portrayed as an obsessed character who loves a good challenge/puzzle. I could see him being so disappointed in himself from missing this clue that he would drop the treatment.

House was a great show at first and remains a great show, people are too critical.