If you watch "House" (and if you don’t, really, what’s wrong with you?) you may have wondered: Where the hell do they come up with these diseases?

Apparently, the N.Y. Post wondered the same thing:

“We read books and newspapers, we read The New England Journal of Medicine.
We are constantly reading medical journals.”

In the episode titled “All In,” the show featured obscure diseases such as
histiocytosis (an immunesystem disorder), sarcoidosis (an inflammation that
adversely affects organ function) and tuberous sclerosis (a rare genetic disease
that causes benign tumor growth).

But sometimes “House” will dramatize more common maladies such as insomnia,
poison ivy, mercury poisoning and lupus .

“The diseases we need are the those that can [manifest as] something else. If
we do a disease that only one person has every 50 years but that turns the hair
plaid and is easily distinguishable, that’s not helpful to us.”

I was also wondering about this:

“They don’t rip
storylines from the headlines, although strange coincidences have occurred, like
when one of the show’s patients was diagnosed with the plague and then
concurrently someone in Los Angeles came down with that city’s first case of
plague in 20 years.
 
“That was shocking,” Shore says. “We’d been working on that episode for three
months when that happened.

Weird.