Dr. John House, of the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles, feels that the fictional doctor on Fox’s TV series is at risk for deafness given the amount of Vicodin he takes:
It is bad enough that the show depicts a doctor treating patients while addicted to a serious narcotic, but Vicodin is ototoxic, which means, if abused, it can cause irreversible and total hearing loss.
Maybe that can be incorporated in a future storyline.
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- Treating chronic pain with narcotics and avoiding the risk of addiction
- Pain management and addiction
- Would you rather have Gregory House or Marcus Welby as your doctor?
- How House, M.D. is affecting patients’ expectations of medical care
- Poll: Can house calls provide better medical care at lower costs?
- Dr. Gregory House makes the medical literature
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{ 3 comments }
Is that what caused Rush’s hearing loss?
I’ve never found any real literature suggesting that Vicodin causes hearing loss.
It was associated with Rush’s hearing loss, but I doubt Vicodin caused the deafness. I suspect it was autoimmune.
Dr House -
I thought that I might ask you here (as you appear to be a reader of some of the posts of KevinMD at times – and the comment section of the ABC News Health article is a dense miasma of chatter as it stands already).
In your ABC News Health article you make the statement that, “Vicodin is ototoxic”, and refer to patients under your care who consumed, “15 to 75 tablets per day”.
At 500mg of acetaminophen (minimum, I believe) per (5mg) hydrocodone tablet, such intake represents a truly astronomical amount of acetaminophen (7.5g to 37.5g in a 24-hour time period), not to mention 75mg to 375mg of hydrocodone bitartrate.
I assume that you would likely not make the assertion that hydrocodone (itself) or circulating metabolite of hydrocodone (themselves) have been definitively shown to be neurotoxic in the human hearing system – were it not for a specifically identified mechanism having been identified at some point by someone.
From a *small* bit of research, I was only able to find papers that noted such phenomena in persons consuming hydrocodone/aetaminophen combinations (where the measured mass of acetaminophen equals 100 times that of the hydrocodone bitartrate present in each individual dosage.
Ho, Vrabec, and Burton, Baylor College of Medicine (in Pain Physician, May 2007, (also) only studied patients consuming similar hydrocodone/acetaminophen combination medications. However, they refer to such measurable hearing loss at (hydrocodone) dosing ranges as low (at least in one or more cases) as “10″ … “mg per day”.
Is your assertion that “Vicodin is ototoxic” based upon *direct* findings establishing that hydrocodone (or it’s circulating metabolites) are definitively the culprit in these episodes – or is it your speculation by (secondary) *deduction* (based on a dearth of such reports where comparable quantities of acetaminophen consumed have been reported to cause such phenomena in the human hearing system?)
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