Gregory House -Hugh Laurie
Head of the Department of Diagnostic Medicine

Lisa Cuddy-Lisa Edelstein
Chief Hospital Administrator

James Wilson-Robert Sean Leonard
Head of the Department of Oncology

Eric Foreman-Omar Epps
Physician

Allison Cameron-Jennifer Morrison
Physician

Robert Chase-Jesse Spencer
Physician

Gregory House, M.D., is a maverick medical genius, who heads a team of young diagnosticians at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey. Most episodes start with a cold open somewhere outside the hospital, showing the events leading to the onset of symptoms for that episode's main patient. The episode follows the team in their attempts to diagnose and treat the patient's illness.
House's nationally-renowned department typically only sees patients who have failed to receive a correct diagnosis at other hospitals, so the cases tend to be exceptionally complex and subtle. Furthermore, House tends to resist accepting cases that he does not find interesting. The medical cases featured are often rare but realistic, and described by Andrew Holtz, the author of The Medical Science of House, M.D., as "a conglomeration of all the worst things that can happen to people from all over the world, crammed into one little community."
The team arrives at diagnoses using the Socratic method and differential diagnosis, with House guiding the deliberations. House often discounts the information and opinions from his underlings, pointing out that their contributions have missed various relevant factors. The patient is usually misdiagnosed over the course of each episode and treated with medications appropriate to the misdiagnoses. This usually causes further complications in the patient, but in turn helps lead House and his team to the correct diagnosis by using the new symptoms.
Often the ailment cannot be easily deduced because the patient has lied about symptoms and circumstances. House frequently mutters, "Everybody lies," or proclaims during the team's deliberations: "The patient is lying," or "The symptoms never lie." Even when not stated explicitly, this assumption guides House's decisions and diagnoses.
Because House's theories about a patient's illness tend to be based on subtle or controversial insights, he often has trouble obtaining permission from his boss, hospital administrator Dr. Lisa Cuddy, to perform medical procedures he thinks are necessary; especially when the procedures themselves involve a high degree of risk or are ethically dubious.
Cuddy also requires House to spend time treating patients in the hospital's walk-in clinic; House's begrudging fulfillment of this duty is a recurring subplot on the show. During clinic duty, House confounds patients with an eccentric bedside manner and unorthodox treatments, but impresses them with rapid and accurate diagnoses after seemingly not paying attention. Realizations made during some of the simple problems House faces in the clinic often help him solve the main case.
Episodes frequently feature the practice of entering a patient's house with or without the owner's permission in order to search for clues that might suggest a certain pathology. The creator, David Shore, originally intended for the show to be a CSI-type show where the "germs were the suspects," but has since shifted much of the focus to the characters rather than concentrating solely on the environment.
Another large portion of the plot centers on House's abuse of Vicodin and other drugs to manage pain stemming from an infarction in his quadriceps muscle some years earlier, which causes him to walk with a cane. The pain and substance abuse act to increase many of his more objectionable character traits while not impairing his medical acumen, which leads him to often self-medicate.
House is in many respects a medical Sherlock Holmes. This resemblance is evident in various elements of the series' plot, such as House's reliance on psychology to solve a case, his reluctance to accept cases he does not find interesting, his drug addiction, home address (apartment 221B), playing of an instrument, relationship with Dr. James Wilson (a reference to Dr. John Watson), and his encounter with a crazed gunman credited as "Moriarty", which is the same name as Holmes' nemesis. Also, series creator Da