45 Times Experts Who Should've Known Better Were Shockingly And Dangerously Wrong

My grandma had hip surgery and they messed up connecting her leg and hip back together. So when it was done and they told her to try moving, she couldn’t. Her leg seriously wasn’t connected to her hip.

Doctor spent the next week berating her as she was in agony going through physical therapy. Saying things like “you aren’t even trying!” and telling our family “she’s really wasting everyone’s time.” He would be that mean to her in front of us too!!!

Once that week was up, they did another round of x-rays. They quickly wheeled her back into surgery all hush hush just saying they “had complications.” We never heard him admit anything or apologize to my grandmother. We still don’t know if it was something that could’ve been prevented or was just a genuine fluke, but he shouldn’t have treated her like that regardless.

I think often of an argument I got into with my art professor. He insisted he was going to see Michelangelo’s David at The Uffizi. I assured him it wasn’t there but down the street at a separate museum. I dug in a little but then he basically said, look, who do you think knows where that statue is, a student or an art professor?

I had a professor explaining some method of statistical analysis and I couldn't understand why my numbers didn't make sense when I used it. I asked for clarification and she just repeated the same thing. When I got specific with my issue, she just said I had to be doing something wrong. Mind you, she never gave an example during the class. I tried it with information that i already had the full data set for and but it didn't work when I used her method. When I tried to show her, all she said was, "I've been doing this for 15 years. You have to be doing something wrong.".

A mate went to ER with some really bad pain in his foot.

He was told by the doctor that it was gout & he needed to stop eating so much meat - my mate's a vegetarian.

Was told repeatedly my abdominal issues was 'women's problems', even had exploratory surgery looking at my reproductive system!

Turns out I had 53 years of undiagnosed celiac disease that ripped my digestive system into shreds. Massive surgery, major recovery, and I will never be well again.
But it's ok, nothing was wrong with the baby-making equipment.
Had it been properly investigated 40 years ago - or any of the other times I presented with the ongoing debilitating pain, my quality of life would have been completely different 🤷‍♀️.
Trust the experts...

Brought my 18 month old to the ER after he turned red and hived up after eating peanut butter. Children’s ER doc told us that was not a typical symptom of an allergic reaction.

🤦‍♀️ that is a text book symptom of an allergic reaction to a food. Our pediatrician was not impressed with the ER doc. Yes, my son was and still is allergic to peanuts.

There was that guy that made the "best" identity theft company and he gave put his actual social security number on Fox News... he had his identity stolen.

My psychiatrist spent 4 years changing my medication (prescriptions, schedules and dosages) while I complained about my extreme sleepiness. I switched to another doctor and got a diagnosis for narcolepsy shortly after.

My husband’s cousin is a veterinarian. She said raccoons are rodents. I said they were not rodents.

A friend of mine told me about his friend’s design project for a college class. It was a folding clamshell phone. The professor of the class went on a tirade about everything that was impractical or just flat out wrong about the design, and gave the student an F.

The student later went on to work for Motorola. His design became the StarTAC.

The professor adamantly refused to apologize for getting it so wrong, even as numerous companies rushed to make their own flip phone designs.

Edit: To the professor's credit, he was right about certain aspects of the design. The hinges of flip phones are prone to cracking and breaking from repeated use, and the cables connecting the two parts often fail after many cycles of opening and closing the phone. (Both of those things eventually happened to my StarTAC.) He was a very strict pragmatist when it came to product design, and dinged the student for a design that would eventually break from use. But he severely underestimated how many people would set those concerns aside for the sheer coolness factor.

I worked for a non profit years back, whose programming was largely centered on backcountry canoeing. I was a guide for years, then a program coordinator. When the org expanded to a new part of the country, I was in charge of the crews that would explore the routes and areas for the purpose of triaging how well suited they’d be to our programs. My boss insisted on hiring an “expert” to guide us on a multi night river trip. We all knew he was an idiot from the outset, but he got the benefit of the doubt. We shared a canoe for a stretch, and at this particular set of rapids, he said there’s an eddy we wants to pull into. He said he’d say “when” and I’d do a big draw from the bow to initiate the eddy turn. The eddy came, the eddy went. He asked me what I was doing, why didn’t I draw into the eddy? Dude you said you’d say “when.” He said, well yea but I thought you’d know when. Yes, of course I knew the ideal time to draw, but that’s not how “wait until I say ‘when’” works. Then he was demonstrating “lining” a canoe in rapids. His rope management was abysmal, he was literally tangled in his own rope to the point that a fall could have been disastrous. I had to re-demonstrate his demonstration for my staff so they could see proper rope management. Then he sliced his hand open while demonstrating his version of axe safety. Then he blamed me when a colleague slipped on a rock while portaging, stating that I foster an attitude of pushing ourselves too hard. The woman literally told me afterwards that she had paused for a break and he pushed her to press on because “we’re almost there.” This guy was a total dud in every aspect of backcountry camping. We put a meal together (that he had packed) and he berated me for not “pressing the garlic.” It was minced garlic in a brine. Chances are if you do any canoeing in Manitoba, you’ve heard of this guy. Supposedly he trains Canada’s special forces in backcountry survival. Yea, right.

Went to several doctors as I was consistently tired and loosing weight. They couldn't come up with an answer. It was finally figured out that my gallbladder was septic. How the heck it was missed for weeks between 3 doctors I will never understand.

Husband was running a high fever and was generally unwell. Went to the doctor who said it was allergies. Now hubby does have allergies but it wasn’t the season and he has never in his life run a fever with allergies. A few weeks later, came back with a vengence and never went away. Just maybe stop running the fever and then come back but the general unwell kept going. Went to three different doctors. Allergies each time. Begged them to run tests, anything because this was definetly not allergies.

MRSA. It was a freaking systemic MRSA infection for three freaking months. They still can’t explain why he survived except it didn’t go into his lungs. We know exactly how he caught it which is a story in itself. But we didn’t know until he got a nasty cut that required stitches and suddenly became horribly infected even though everything was done sterile and we had to dressed properly etc. I took him to the ER and demanded a swab and other tests because I watched it swell twice its size in a few hours. This was not a normal infection. They did many swabs and tests.

What they eventually sat down and told us was he had had this for three months (based on our timeline and medical records) but somehow his body kept it supressed enough and compartmentalized sorta. Then when he had the inflamation and injury to his finger, it gave it a place to flourish and eacape so to speak and made it very clear how lucky he was to be alive.

Sometimes they really do need to look for zebras.

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

- Paul Krugman, 1998.

I was a journeyman electrician working at a mine in Canada. I was responsible for bringing in power and control wiring into a very specialized, and very expensive piece of equipment that was built in Germany.

The German company had a rep on site that was responsible for commissioning and start up of said machine.

This guy was a massive jerk. Arrogant, unhappy human who would yell and belittle anyone in his vicinity.

There were some engineering issues. Specifically the supplied control power was at a higher voltage than the equipment was designed for.

After some ugly battles about how to bring in all the cables, the rep kicked out myself and any of our guys. Wouldn't allow us to even be in the room and he said he would do it all himself.

He wired in everything. Was over schedule and wasting time. I knew that it was wrong. Tried to explain it to him but he wouldn't hear it. I went to my boss and he got the same treatment.

Came the day to turn on the control power and I got asked to flip the breaker.i said no because we didn't do the work or were allowed to QA/QC it. The German got extremely angry, yelled at everyone about how incompetent we all were and then flipped the breaker himself.

He let the smoke out of the motherboard. Tried to blame me. Got sent home in the plane the next day.

Weeks to get replacement parts. Nice memories.

Junior high mathematics teacher confidently stating that 0/0 = 1, based on “any number divided by itself is 1.”

Any number divided by zero is undefined or indeterminate. (Some may argue infinity.).

My Mom is an astrophysicist at NASA but also can't log into her home wifi without my help. She has been using the internet since the 80's. Ooof.

My doctor was certain I have bipolar. I have been assessed 3 times and declared not. She put me on Zoloft and I got serotonin syndrome as a result.

Ophthalmologist told me I had a lazy eye. Went to get an MRI and turns out it was a brain tumor occupying a quarter of my brain. Good thing they had a last minute cancellation when we called right after leaving the eye doctor. Neurosurgeon said I wouldn’t have lived much longer than another day or two had the MRI not caught it.

Witnessed it just this week. Highly recommended, top dollar electricians wired up my new boat lift. Up switch is down and down is up.