Directed by: Andrew Bernstein
Written by: Carol Green and Dustin Paddock
Brandon (Breckin Meyer) is an artist who has just finished a painting of a client's wife. The client looks at the painting and is so dissatisfied with it that he demands a refund and punches the artist. Heather (Marika Domińczyk), the artist's girlfriend, looks at the painting and is confused: the woman's face in the painting is very distorted. This is not how Brandon normally paints.
Dr. Cuddy refuses Dr. House's request to invoice the private investigator's billing to the hospital. The investigator becomes interested in Cuddy and asks her out on a date.
House figures out that the patient is a pharmaceutical guinea pig, he's taking three different test medications in clinical drug trials that will hopefully lead to those medications getting FDA approval. Dr. Foreman says it's difficult enough to understand how drugs interact if they do what they're supposed to do, and much more difficult if they're not doing what they're supposed to do. House orders dialysis to flush out all the test drugs: the known risks of rapid detox are preferable to the unknown risks of unpredictable drug interactions.
The patient's agnosia relapses, he sees Dr. Taub as David Goldman instead of Peter Jacobson and Dr. Hadley as Deanna Smith instead of Olivia Wilde.
The patient confesses to his girlfriend that he has only sold two paintings in the past three years. He has stayed afloat financially by enrolling in drug trials.
House reveals several things his private investigator has learned about his team: Hadley has made some poor financial decisions and Mrs. Taub (Jennifer Crystal Foley) has a secret bank account, leading Dr. Taub to confront his wife about it (turns out she was saving up to buy him a car).
This episode contains examples of the following tropes:
- Starving Artist : this week's patient would be one without the clinical drug trials he's enrolled in. Dr. Hadley has had some experience with "struggling artists," which leads her to think the patient does a lot of recreational drugs (this was before Dr. House figured out the thing about the drug trials).
- Test Subject for Hire: The patient of this episode is eventually revealed to be one of these. The various drugs he was taking turned out to be accumulating in a mass in his stomach, causing multiple various baffling symptoms.
