A 55-year-old German man suffered severe heart failure and the symptoms were a bit puzzling, including deafness, blindness, fever and enlarged lymph nodes. For months his doctors were baffled.
Later he was diagnosed by Dr. Juergen Schaefer at the Center for Undiagnosed Diseases in Marburg, Frankfurt north. In just first five minutes the doctor managed to understand what was wrong with the patient.
Schaefer said the symptoms of the German man matched with a patient shown on TV in an episode of medical drama 'House.' In the television show a British actor Hugh Laurie had perfectly the same symptoms as the man and was identified as cobalt poisoning.
Schaefer was a fan of 'House' earlier that ended in 2012 after airing for 8 long years. He and his colleagues tested for cobalt levels for the German man after he said the problems started following an operation of broken ceramic hip replacement.
In the test Schaefer found small fragments of the ceramic hip in his body were grinding into the metal replacement and from there chromium and cobalt leaked and entered the bloostream of the patient. The hip of the patient was thereafter replaced and his symptoms improved and heart too got better.
The previous doctors of the German man even had thought he needed a heart transplant.
Schaefer said people sometimes addressed him as German Dr. House too after the case.
No comments:
Post a Comment