It’s just very painful. Everything shuts down and stops working–kind of like your body is on strike. And during an attack symptoms don’t come and go–they are severe and persistent. It can cause nerve damage. I, for one, had trouble walking and writing/typing after my first attack. Two years later I got a black belt in TKD.

The “cure”–well, there isn’t one. Glucose helps allay symptoms to a degree, and a transfusion of heme will provide the necessary enzyme that people with AIP don’t make. But that’s only given during an attack.

i’m getting really really sick of the “we can’t test for it! time’s running out! just treat him!” formula. three quarters of the Dx that house throws out have simple tests that take little time. the writers need to find some other, less annoying, more credible way to achieve their suspense quota.

“Would the “suprapubic tap” (House plunging the syringe into his bladder to extract urine) result in urine escaping into his body?”

I’m not a doctor, but I doubt it. I happen to know that it’s the standard way of getting a urine sample from cats, who after all cannot be trusted to obey an order to pee into a cup. :-) It seems unlikely that other mammals’ bladders would be significantly different structurally from cats’ bladders.

In any case, if a drop or two of urine did escape, it’s sterile and would presumably just be eliminated by the normal clean-up mechanisms of the body.

Hugh Laurie’s comedy partner Stephen Fry (”A Bit of Fry and Laurie”) has appeared as a psychiatrist on “Bones.” It would be cool to get them together again.