63 Medical Professionals Reveal What They’d Tell Patients If There Were No Consequences

You don't need to be in the ER spending thousands of dollars for your non emergent issue.

Get to the point. I don’t need to know about things that happened to your neighbor/family member. I’d love to talk about things further if we were friends but this is work and we are running a business.

Just like you don’t talk the ear off of a cashier, don’t talk my ear off either. There’s other people waiting to be taken care of as well.

ER Nurse, not a doctor, but: we can’t fix 30+ years of mistreating your body in one visit. Don’t be reactionary with your health when it’s too late, be preventive instead. Take care of yourself starting young to build good habits. Eat right, exercise. If you don’t want to be 65 years old with increased chances of musculoskeletal disease and / or general weakness LIFT WEIGHTS.

I work in a rural primary care clinic. NEVER USE GARLIC TO CLEAN YOUR WOUNDS. I don’t have enough fingers and toes in my whole clinic to count the number of wounds I had to debride and dress just from the burns and eschar patients have because of it.

Your wounds are not meat to be marinated people.

I know you're drinking. I know you are. I don't need the lie, because I can see it all over your labs and I have access to your medical records for the last ten years.

I've literally had a patient tell me they are not drinking, forcing me to a get a liver biopsy to confirm my suspicion, had the biopsy confirm alcohol use and then they still lied for another few days until they caved and confirmed.

If grandma broke her hip it’s probably Grandma’s last Christmas and you should plan accordingly.

The hospital is not always the “best” place to be for your issues.

Admission to the hospital does not mean you will get everything done faster or that we will find an answer sooner. Some of this is due to resources and some of it is financial. If I order that MRI scan “while you’re here anyway” to get it done it is the lowest priority and will be overtaken by any emergency that comes into the ER. Some of it is financial. Insurance may only cover some procedures if done as an outpatient. Sometimes the outpatient offices may actually have better diagnostic tools.

Sometimes we don’t get a clear diagnosis and we may not before you go home as long as you are improving.

A hospital is a place to address life threatening or organ threatening conditions. It is not a one stop shop to optimize all of your medical conditions before you go home. Staying in the hospital longer comes with a whole list of its own problems.

Not a doctor, but a nurse. I can speak for doctors since they feel the exact way. You can have the nicest patient, but the family is straight from hell and beyond plain stupid. You can tell them something over and over and they just don't get it. They tend to be disruptive and just rude to all the medical team.

Because of their behavior, no nurse or doctor wants to deal with them. Literally, the nurses will argue not to have them as a patient, so they end up with floats. The doctor wants them stable and discharge ASAP. You end up resenting them and not eager to go up and beyond helping them.

The family is actually feels that they are helping the patient, but it has an opposite effect. It is important to be an advocate for your love one, but not in treating the staff that are trying to help like trash. So, if you have a different nurse after one night with you, this tells you that they do not want to deal with you. List do get changed, but not that consistently.

I want to respond “no you’re not” to people who say they’re pretty healthy. 9/10 times they smoke and are obese.

Don't fall for a Medicare Advantage plan. 
It doesn't matter what your blood glucose monitor says, drinking sweet tea and eating potato salad is not a good way to manage your blood sugar. 
Prioritize taking your meds regularly. This is not negotiable. 
Your obesity IS related to a lot of your health problems, and a lot of them WOULD improve if you lost weight. 
Mental health is health. .

Not a doctor but I work in the admin side of the hospital booking patients for appointments.

The amount of times I want to tell a patient that "no your nail/hairdresser appointment is not more important than your appointment with the consultant" is mindboggling.

I guarantee you as well that those are also the same people who complain that they haven't been seen quick enough.

People can be so bloody ungrateful and it is ridiculous.

Also if i say "I'm not medically trained and cannot provide you with any test results" then stop bloody pestering me for them!

Many people with numerous unexplainable symptoms despite huge amounts of normal testing do not have a unifying medical diagnosis. While it's fine to keep looking, understand the possibility that some may be related to anxiety, depression, or situational issues. There are unscrupulous people who will overmedicalize you at enormous cost or risk. Avoid people on social media who have made their entire life revolve around being sick like the plague. (Despite what some people think, we do not take any delight in making people feel bad, and we do not deliberately hide treatments).

I have worked in many emergency rooms cities or suburbs that have lots of hospitals. Hospitals have different resources. Many times, people wanted to be at one hospital over another (because of a specialist available, etc), but an ambulance may have taken them to my hospital instead. Or they need a higher level of care or specific procedure and want to be transferred to a specific hospital. Well, in order for me to transfer someone, I need to get permission from a call center and an accepting physician, which can be impossible at certain times of the year due to bed availability, etc.

It can take me days to get you to the hospital you want. But if you leave against medical advice and uber the 20 minutes to the other hospital down the road, you will get where you want to go way, way faster and they can't refuse you if you walk into their ED

Also, most of your problems are due to your lack of activity, lack of participating in preventative care, poor diet, and obesity. I can't fix that today.

It’s a “yes or no” question, please answer yes or no.

Don’t show up to your family member’s planned-well-in-advance-surgery day and ask 10 million questions five minutes before we’re supposed to roll in the OR. The time for asking a hundred questions is the preop appointment and it is literally why we instruct people BRING your caregiver(s) with you. Two sets or ears and brains are better than one and caregivers often have different concerns that are totally important. Also, I have no problem answering general questions but if you want to *fully understand* what’s happening and why, SHOW UP to the preop and actually be present, physically and mentally, at that time, and ask them then. The number of people who we’ve have never seen in years of treatment who we meet for the first time the day of surgery who act like we’ve just signed someone up willy nilly for surgery or act like we’ve not thought of all the things and want a TedTalk about why were doing things this way and not that way is astounding.

Yes you are going to wait a very long time in the ER when you come in for non-emergent/urgent complaints.

Will we still see you? Yes. But we see people based off of acuity, not first come first serve.

And yea, it will take 4 hours to get a CT scan to further evaluate your 3+ months of abdominal pain you’ve had. But you know what? It’s still faster than the outpatient work up you’d get that takes weeks.

So stop being an Ahole to us. We’re trying to help as best we can.

Sometimes I really have to choose which patients’ problems are more pressing and/or life-threatening. It may sound harsh but there just isn’t enough time in my day to spend listening to every problem in someone’s life, many of which cannot be solved by medical science. I try to be fully present and give each patient the time and attention they deserve, but when we’re 30 mins into a conversation where you’re trauma-dumping and insisting I try to treat every single joint that hurts from your fibromyalgia… it’s just not about you anymore at that point.

Not a doctor, but one of my sisters is a registered nurse.

She explains that one of the things she wishes she could do for a patient's family is apologize to them if the situation was determined to be terminal despite efforts to save them. The main reason she wasn't allowed to express her regrets, and this also applies to licensed doctors, is because there is a risk of malpractice, which is typically enforced by insurance companies. She is authorized to advise individuals close to the patient of the bad news, but she is not allowed to apologize. The reason was that the doctor or nurse may be sued for medical malpractice if it was misinterpreted as accepting responsibility, even if they had nothing to do with it.

She is also not allowed to declare someone died because she is a nurse. Only a licensed doctor can do it, even if she is aware of it.

The level of service that you will receive today will be the result of what your insurance company wishes to pay and not on what we actually want to provide you, unfortunately.

There’s a large ophthalmology group by me that has a lot of name recognition. When I need to refer for cataract surgery, I really try to refer to anyone but them.

The results just aren’t good. And people are usually pretty disappointed afterwards. I think the lead surgeons used to be good, but… idk what happening over there now. Patients insist on going there despite my recommendations for literally anyone else.

The times I’ve tried to steer people away has resulted in them saying I’m biased towards others and their dads brothers dog went there and yada yada. It’s not fun.