The doctor had a feeling he’d seen this somewhere before.
Then it dawned on him just where.
Dr. Juergen Schaefer is a big fan of the TV series “House,” and it paid off for one patient.
But Schaefer remembered seeing something similar on an episode of his favorite show. Se he did testing for cobalt poisoning, and the results were positive.
The patient was a 55-year-old man with a laundry list of issues. He was going deaf, losing his sight, and in the first stages of heart failure.
The Local in Berlin, Germany reports the man had a hip replacement, and the metal joint was wearing away and leeching into his system.
The answer was surgery to replace the metal joint with new ceramic model.
Doctors noted, "shortly after the hip replacement, the patient's plasma (blood) cobalt and chromium concentrations decreased, and the patient stabilized and recovered slightly."
The patient still has many serious problems but is no longer near death.