Spin (House episode)

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House episode
"Spin"

Episode no.	HOU-206
Airdate	November 15, 2005
Writer(s)	Sara Hess
Director(s)	Fred Gerber
Guest star(s)	Sela Ward as Stacy Warner, Currie Graham as Mark Warner, Kristoffer Polaha as Jeff
House Season 2 September 2005 - May 2006
Acceptance Autopsy Humpty Dumpty TB or Not TB Daddy's Boy Spin Hunting The Mistake Deception Failure to Communicate Need to Know Distractions Skin Deep Sex Kills Clueless Safe All In Sleeping Dogs Lie House vs. God Euphoria, Part 1 Euphoria, Part 2 Forever Who's Your Daddy? No Reason
All House episodes

Spin is the sixth episode of the second season of House, which premiered on the FOX network on November 15, 2005.

1 Synopsis
2 Diagnosis
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Synopsis

A famous cyclist is brought to House's clinic after collapsing during a race. He is surprisingly honest about several illegal medications and techniques he applied to himself, but his sickness is not caused by any of these. House believes he is not completely honest, whilst Cameron does not cope well with the patient's foul play. House also gives Stacy a hard time, mainly because of her new husband, Mark, who is under therapy at the hospital.

In the course of making a diagnosis the team deduced the presence of an air-embolus. When the air-embolism was found and removed, without helping his symptoms followed by system-wide muscle weakness, Encephalitis or nerve-damage or paraneoplastic symptomatic bone cancer is differentiated, none of which is confirmed. Then and throughout most of the episode, House is convinced he is taking animal cultured Erythropoietin (short half-life EPO) which acts by binding to a specific erythropoietin receptor (EpoR) on the surface of red cell precursors in the bone marrow, stimulating them to transform into mature red blood cells. As a result the oxygen level in blood reaching the kidney rises and the amount of EPO produced naturally decreases, thus presumably causing all of his symptoms as he fails to produce red blood cells on his own (Anemia caused by acute Acquired pure red cell aplasia). However, after responding to Prednisone (an Immunosuppressive drug) treatment by losing more red blood cells to the point of requiring a transfusion, House instructs to go scan his neck, when a Thymoma is found (causing chronic PRCA and previously countered Myasthenia gravis), all future performance enhancing Blood doping becomes medicinal (at least until the required Thymectomy is done and takes effect in up to 3-5 years, at which point medicinal Steroids may also be prescribed).

This diagnosis is particularly ironic because of the debate and grousing over how the patient had been misleading his fans by engaging in quasi-legal blood doping and hypobaric immersion performance enhancement methods, thus giving himself an edge over the other, presumably honest, athletes. However, his methods of "cheating" had, in effect, been unintentional treatments for his diseases, meaning that he had been competing at an un-enhanced level of physical prowess for his entire career. Simply put: by cheating, he brought himself up to average level and won.