Broken News: Area man declares himself medical expert after ‘House’ marathon

PORTLAND—Today a group of concerned family and friends pleaded with local authorities, the Portland medical community, and the FOX Broadcasting Network to try to talk some sense into local resident Charles Matthews, who has seen fit to declare himself a medical expert after watching all 4 seasons of House during one marathon session.

The Emmy Award-winning medical drama, featuring a maladjusted, drug-addicted, curmudgeonly doctor and his team of specialist diagnosticians tackling medical cases involving rare diseases, is produced by director Bryan Singer and stars British actor Hugh Laurie. Friends of the now self-declared Dr. Matthews say that the show's in-depth medical discussions and use of medical procedure combined with high drama has convinced the man that perusing the back catalog of episodes is a substitute for a medical degree and license.

“I’m at a loss to what to do with him,” announced neighbor Jerry Westen, who Matthews diagnosed as having four months left to live. “He’s invasive, rude, authoritative, misanthropic, cynical, obsessive, and doesn’t let anything get in the way of his ‘diagnoses’. My kids had to pull him off me the other day when he claimed I had a myocardial infarction and had to perform a lower lumbar puncture to confirm. After he got up from the ground he told me I had Myasthenia gravis and told the kids I only had months to live. They're still traumatized.”

He continued, rubbing his sore back in the spot where Dr. Matthews performed the spinal tap, “I don’t think he’s even diagnosing things properly. I think I saw that episode, it’s a simple autoimmune disease that can be treated with medication. I don’t think he did this lower lumbar puncture right either. At least he’s as cutting and witty as the TV House. At least there’s that.”

We waited by Dr. Matthews house to get a statement but, as we later discovered, he was busy diagnosing a 12 year-old girl from around the corner with Herpes Encephalitis and demanding that she give a list of her sexual partners so that ‘they’ might be able to save another life and correctly start treatment on the right course of drugs.

When her exasperated parents declared that she was only twelve and had no sexual partners, that he was making her cry, and that he should get the fuck off their lawn before they called the police, Matthews only gruffly spit out the words “Everyone lies”, House’s mantra, before diagnosing the father with subacute sclerosing panencephalitis.

As of this morning Matthews had also been banned from the premises of Providence Portland Medical Center and the Kaiser Sunnyside Medical Center after he wandered the halls in a lab coat changing charted diagnoses of lupus stating “It’s never lupus... or vasculitis”, citing a running theme of the show, before ordering expensive tests for Erdheim-Chester disease.

Matthews also had to be physically removed from Eastmoreland Hospital after he hit an oncologist with his cane and made a racial crack towards a doctor he felt looked like Omar Epps, who plays team member Dr. Eric Foreman on the program. Efforts to charge Dr. Matthews were unsuccessful when during the arrest a reference to the arresting officer’s shaking hand, a diagnosis of fulminating osteomyelitis, a blunt prediction of imminent seizure, and a need to intabate the officer caused a panic at the ER entrance where nurses, confused by Matthews lab coat and the assuredness of his analysis, took the officer in for immediate care.

As of today the ‘doctor’ is currently AWOL from his friends and family, having disappeared after the incident at Eastmoreland. While there have been reports of a scruffy man with a cane popping vicodin like candy and diagnosing the homeless with echinococcosis, gold sodium thiomalate poisoning, haemochromatosis, and zygomycosis at a local shelter, these reports are preliminary.

The family hopes that the authorities can track down Dr. Matthews and with the help of the medical community explain the concept of dramatic license, fiction, television, and medical school. If these efforts are unsuccessful they hope to convince FOX and some of the secondary cast of House to fly in and explain to Matthews that he’s gone too far this time and he's fired.