Excuse me, doctor. I have a quick question. I haven’t eaten vegetables in 17 years, sleep 4 hours each night, don’t take any vitamins and drink about 8 ounces of water a day. Why in the world am I feeling fatigued all the time?
Medical school is extremely challenging for a reason, and doctors would never expect the average person to know all of the ins and outs of the human body. But everyone should at least know how to take care of themselves (or know when to go to the hospital), right?
Doctors on Reddit have recently been sharing ridiculous things they’ve seen patients do, so we’ve gathered some of their most facepalm-worthy stories below. Keep reading to find a conversation with Dr. Scott Ross, and be sure to upvote the stories that have convinced you to stop putting off your next check-up!
#1
I had a patient come to me in emotional distress. He was afraid because he’d found a box of dirty, used syringes on the street and used them to shoot up. He didn’t know what he had contracted.
I gave him reassurance, told him we would figure out what to do no matter what the test results were. And remarkably, he came back negative for everything. It was such a relief.
On the same visit when I gave him his results, I recommended that he get a tetanus shot. He looked me in the eye and refused “because vaccines are dangerous and kill people.”
It was hard to remain professional at that moment.
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169points
#2
NICU nurse. Had a family with premature triplets that ended up growing, getting very healthy, and all three went home! Definitely a success story.
A few weeks later all three are back in the hospital. We were shocked. Turns out mom brought triplet A into the hospital for dehydration and fever. They ran an electrolyte panel and the different electrolytes were so off that it could’ve been deadly. Baby was immediately admitted and started on IV fluids and medications.
We sent the kids home on a premature baby formula that provides some extra calories to help them grow (Mom did pump/breastfeed, just not enough for triplets, understandably.) Mom stopped using the formula immediately and bought some weird raw goat or sheep milk product from Europe (unsure on precise details) because it’s not even sold in the US. Yeah, uh, your premature triplets either need breast milk or baby formula. They literally cannot handle or process whatever it was she gave them. She was shocked. Had to bring in the other two for testing and they were just as messed up. All three spent several days in the hospital on IVs with many medications to stabilize them so their heart and kidneys wouldn’t fail.
This goes for all infants, btw. Please don’t feed them ANYTHING but baby formula or breast milk for the first 6 months. Please. 🤦🏼♀️.
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159points
#3
Oh boy.
Guy thought marijuana cured everything, had itchy ears, maybe eczema? Stuffed weed in his ears. Went two weeks with this. Got irritated and infected. Had to pull it all out and sterilize it. I just…what?
Dude with diabetes thought freezing his soda into a popsicle made it an ‘icicle’ without the sugar. That day we discussed what ice is.
Dude with diabetes taped his foot back on after it rotted off. Got septic. Maggots were involved.
Guy electrocutes his penis regularly for his herpes. This was done with a 9V battery. He shocks himself for his other health problems too.
Guy doesn’t like water, doesn’t bathe. Also doesn’t leave his house because he doesn’t like people but likes church. Local church tried to help him but he smelled so bad they told him he couldn’t come back. He doesn’t like toilets so he just goes on himself. Shits outside. Somehow married and divorced x3???
“I’m dizzy all the time” lady drinks a 12 pack in a sitting on the regular and gets dizzy after. She is surprised to learn she may be drunk.
Guy calls an ambulance, pulls a gun on the ambulance. Still goes to hospital.
Guy pulls gun on the home health nurses to rob them when they come to do their home health nursing job with him. At his home.
Comes to hospital because his soup tastes ‘not good’. Stays for a week because he needs special diapers sent from a special manufacturer shipped to his house. Is upset that we don’t have HBO or better soup.
Lady screamed at me in the ER because she didn’t believe that the MRI I was showing her belonged to her. Her name was on it. You could see her body shape on the scout image. She then denied having the MRI at all, still wearing the MRI wristband the techs gave her.
During COVID there were many people that denied that they were sick right up until we had to intubate them. They were coughing, hacking, and struggling to breathe, even on BiPAP. Still said that _I_ was the one responsible for making them sick. They all invariably died of multiorgan failure after lingering on the vent for two-four weeks.
Guy comes in with gonorrhea. From an orgy. Right in the middle of 2020 lockdown. He was shocked that I was shocked. “But I wore a mask!” Me: “But no condom???”
There’s many more, unfortunately.
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157points
To learn more about what it's like to encounter patients who are lacking in common sense, we reached out to Scott Ross, MD, who was kind enough to have a chat with Bored Panda. First, we wanted to know if Dr. Ross had ever encountered a patient who had made some questionable decisions.
"Certainly, all physicians see patients who do things that make us shake our heads," he shared. "One of my favorite stories involves a women who came in after eating a bag of expired vegetables. She noticed it smelled bad 'like kimchi.' She stated, 'Well, I like kimchi' and proceeded to eat the food. She was seen for severe diarrhea."
#4
I used to be a medical scribe in a pediatric office. A mom came in complaining that her daughter was turning black, obviously we were concerned what kind of infection or abuse was this child experiencing? The kid was tanning, she was running around and playing in the sun and was tanning.
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121points
#5
I’m friends with a nutritionist at a hospital. One of the stories that stuck with me was a mid 30s construction worker just collapsed one day. His coworkers called an ambulance and he rushed to the hospital right? Well they discover he’s nutrient deficient like in everything. So my friend is called in and she’s asking him about his diet…” well I don’t like eating breakfast, and I don’t like eating then going back to work so I don’t eat lunch and then I get home and the wife has to make dinner so I start drinking beer and by the time dinner is ready I don’t wanna eat. Just have some more beer and go to bed.” The dude was living off of nothing but beer. He couldn’t remember the last time he actually ate something.
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116points
#6
My mom was an ER nurse for 30 years, so I have endless stories of idiots like this. One gem was a dude who came in because his legs weren't working. When asked if he had previous issues, he said no.
He was super loopy, so she grilled him a bit and it turned out he was zonked out of his mind on pain pills and had been for 24 hours a day for more than a week because he'd hurt his leg at work.
Turns out he'd broken his leg at work and started taking pain pills to compensate. He took so many the pain was totally gone, so he felt cured and spent a solid week walking around on his broken leg until the bone turned into crumbles and shredded the tendon. He didn't realize there was an issue until the bone started pushing out of his leg and the pain was too much for the handfuls of pills to counteract.
Dude wound up losing his leg due to infection and internal bleeding. During his week long journey on painkiller he also punctured both eardrums with qtips while cleaning his ears. Developed awful and infected hemorrhoids from pushing too hard and wiping too hard. Broke three teeth from clenching his teeth - he was also taking speed to counteract being sleepy from the pain killers. And he had slammed his hand in his car door and broke two fingers.
So they got him all fixed up but he developed an opiate addiction. My mom said he'd come in once a week begging for pills and try to steal stuff from the hospital. Then he wrecked his car on purpose, killing a college girl in the process, just to get pain killers.
He wound up in prison for 15 years because when the cops searched his car the trunk was full to the brim of stolen guns he'd been selling to random people on the street to buy pills.
Yes, this was in Florida.
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109points
We also asked the physician why it's so difficult for people to know how to take care of themselves. "I think for basic healthy living, most people do know what to do but make poor choices," he explained. "People know that smoking, heavy drinking and over eating are bad for them, but these remain common causes of morbidity and mortality."
#7
My paramedic gf at the time told me of a person who would call out the ambulance frequently. She was a germaphobe and would swallow razor-blades frozen into icecubes to somehow destroy the germs inside her.
Thankfully the stomach acid often blunted the blades, but still….
Thankfully the stomach acid often blunted the blades, but still….
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107points
#8
Me, a dentist, to my patient: “Please, do not superglue your tooth back in your mouth again.”
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104points
#9
I'm an optometrist in the U.S. and have a couple of memorable ones.
I had an argument with one patient who insisted that there were great healing benefits to using urine eye drops. When asked about how she got these urine eye drops, she admitted to taking them directly from the toilet and putting them straight into her eyes. My pleas for her to consider the risk of developing bacterial keratitis fell on deaf ears. Still dreading the day that one returns to clinic with an infection.
And if I had a nickel for every time a patient came to me ~6 months after taking a severe blow to the eye and losing vision, only to find that they had a total retinal detachment that they thought they could just "walk off" instead of seeking care, I would have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice in the three years I've been practicing.
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94points
"I realize there are often psychological issues that need to be addressed, but personal responsibility is important also," Dr. Ross added. "For complex medical issues, it is important to find a physician that you can trust."
And we shouldn't necessarily trust everything that we find through a Google search. "It is reasonable to self-educate with online searches, but I think it is best to use sites from medical schools or medical facilities that one is familiar with," the expert says.
#10
Had a patient with recurrent infected leg ulcers. Reason: rather than clean and dress them as instructed, she was letting her dog "lick them clean".
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92points
#11
As a pediatrician, lots of things every day. But also I have so much empathy because when it comes to your kids, of course you're going to worry and logic goes out the window. Lots of ED visits for "fever" of 99F that improved with Tylenol, and the family waits 3 hours for me to see their healthy kid. It more makes me sad they spent their time that way! And that they were so stressed during that time! ):
More egregious examples are the naturopath parents - not even anti Vaxxers, but the ones who's kids have horrific chronic illness such as IBD or lupus and refuse to give them "western medicine". It's enraging, their children suffer, are in pain, and in many cases have had irreversible damage because their parents want them to drink baking soda instead of receiving life saving medications for their systemic illnesses.
Jehovah's witnesses irk me in a similar way - especially when their babies have serious congenital anomalies and they refuse the lifesaving surgery initially unless it's "bloodless", which is an entire other illogical conversation to have anyway.
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91points
#12
My mother tried treating a diabetic who was convinced she was allergic to water, so she’d only drink coca cola. I’ll never forget that one….
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89points
We hope you're enjoying scrolling through these stories, pandas. Please remember not to put off your own doctor's appointments if you think something is wrong, and if you're a health care worker, feel free to share your own experiences with patients in the comments below. Keep upvoting the stories you find most amusing, and if you'd like to read even more, check out this Bored Panda piece next!
#13
My mom once had a patient who was an old lady who was rushed to the E.R. after ingesting bug spray. After they managed to get her to a stable condition and had her admitted to a ward a few days later Mom asked her why she did that.
Her response? "I accidentally swallowed a cockroach so I swallowed the bug spray to kill the cockroach.".
88points
#14
My patient who crawled under his truck and “leg pressed” his engine back into place two weeks after his total hip arthroplasty. Came into clinic complaining of pain….
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85points
#15
Not a dr. A nurse.
My patient, who had just had 2 toes amputated due to uncontrolled Type 2 Diabetes, "my blood sugar is only high when Im in hospital"
Me: "do you check it at home?"
Patient: "No".
Me: "so how do you know?"
Pt: "it just doesn't feel high."
Me:........
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85points
#16
EMT here. Got called out for a “hand laceration with severe bleeding” so naturally we urgently drive to the callers house.
We arrive to find this young, around 18yr old female holding her hand and wincing in pain. Confused at the lack of blood I ask her to point to her wound & she points to a cut no bigger than 1cm. She states that her family doesn’t own bandages & she didn’t want to get an infection by going to the pharmacy to buy them.
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81points
#17
My best friend is in his residency right now and he had a patient that had a wound in his face that was festering so bad there were maggots living in it. He didn’t think it was important enough to be seen until they started falling into his cereal.
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79points
#18
I once had a 50-something lady in the ER complaining of difficulty using her left hand. Turned out that it wasn’t new, rather something that had been an issue all her life.
She was right handed.
She was right handed.
79points
#19
Not a doctor, but heres the stupidest thing a doctor told me once.
I'm a microbiology lab technician in the hospital lab. And a DOCTOR - full fledged, board certified - asked me why I couldn't just put the petri plates in the microwave so it grows faster to know what bacteria and antibiotics to use.
WHAT.
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78points
#20
I'm a lawyer but I had a consultation with a potential client who was in a car accident and believed she lost her brain. Literally thought her brain was no longer in her head.
I also had a postal worker who wanted to sue the post office because he was exposed to "potentially toxic chemicals from a leaking package." When I asked him to describe it, he said it looked and smelled like honey. I asked what the package looked like. He said it was a can that said, "honey.".
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74points