Gregory House, M.D., often construed as a misanthropic medical genius, heads a team of diagnosticians at the Princeton–Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey. The series is structured around a central plot with some supporting secondary stories and narratives that cross over seasons. Most episodes revolve around the diagnosis of a primary patient and start with a cold open set outside the hospital, showing events ending with the onset of the patient's symptoms. The typical episode follows the team in their attempts to diagnose and treat the patient's illness, which often fail until the patient's condition is critical. They usually treat only patients whom other doctors have not accurately diagnosed, and House routinely rejects cases he does not find interesting. Typically, the patient is misdiagnosed at least once which usually causes further complications, but the nature of the complications often provides new evidence which helps them diagnose the patient correctly. House often tends to arrive at the correct diagnosis seemingly out of the blue, often inspired by a passing remark made by another character. Diagnoses range from relatively common to very rare diseases. The team faces many diagnostic difficulties from patients' concealment of symptoms, circumstances, or personal histories, so House frequently proclaims during the team's deliberations, "The patient is lying", or mutters "Everybody lies"; such an assumption guides House's decisions and diagnoses and makes the countermeasure of housebreaking a routine procedure. Because many of his hypotheses are based on epiphanies or controversial insights, he often has trouble obtaining permission for medical procedures he considers necessary from his superior, who in all but the final season is hospital administrator Dr. Lisa Cuddy. This is especially the case when the proposed procedures involve a high degree of risk or are ethically questionable. Frequent disagreements occur between House and his team, especially Dr. Allison Cameron, whose standards of medical ethics are more conservative than those of the other characters. Like all of the hospital's doctors, House is required to treat patients in the facility's walk-in clinic. His grudging fulfillment of this duty, or his creative methods of avoiding it, constitute a recurring subplot, which often serves as the series' comic relief. During clinic duty, House confounds patients with unwelcome observations into their personal lives, eccentric prescriptions, and unorthodox treatments. However, after seeming to be inattentive to their complaints, he regularly impresses them with rapid and accurate diagnoses. Analogies with some of the simple cases