Doctors Share Unethical Things They’ve Seen, Here Are The 30 Most Interesting Answers

Not unethical exactly, but frowned upon by the hospital if they found out. When I was a junior doctor, I had an elderly patient on our specialist cardiology ward who'd had to travel 100 miles for a really specialist treatment. She didn't have any family, and all her friends were similarly elderly and couldn't drive far, let alone a 200 mile round trip to visit her. She confided in me that she was running out of clean nightdresses and was embarrassed as she didn't know what to do, so I took them home and washed them for her in my machine. Looking back, I'm sure there was some procedure I should have followed - we're not supposed to get personally involved - but she was so sweet and it was late and all the admin people had gone home.

It's gotta be this guy: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Courtney He diluted cancer chemotherapy drugs for years to make profit. Countless d***s, countless needless treatments, countless cancer study data rendered useless. By one man.

My best friend's mother, Roulla, is from Lebanon. When Roulla was a young girl she got pretty badly injured and went to the hospital. The doctor then proceeded to tell Roulla's mother that she had passed away due to the injuries. She did not believe her and soon discovered Roulla locked in a closet, waiting to be presumably be sold.

My step dad is a dentist had a boss, who was a fellow dentist, that was doing fillings on teeth that did not have cavities to generate more money. My step dad blew the whistle and started his own practice.

Not a doctor, but a (male) nurse at a hospital I worked at was caught sodomizing (male) patients as they were recovering from surgery.

I'm not a doctor (yet), but when I was shadowing a doctor I went with her to an "malpractice risk management" meeting. The entire meeting was about how to cover up malpractice by shifting the blame on each other so no one can get sued, how to avoid testifying against each other in court, and how to use messy handwriting when filling out documents so if it does go to court, the evidence is hard to interpret. It even used dozens of examples of cases from the hospital that were actual malpractice, but the patient never got compensated because of the risk management techniques used to avoid being sued. That meeting absolutely horrified me. The funny thing is most people think its easy to sue a doctor for even genuine malpractice. It isn't.

I am currently a medicine student in Mexico. One of my professors told us that during his residency he worked in hospital on a fairly poor area. In these sorts of places birth control is a relatively unused practice, leading to poor families of 6+ children. In effort to stop this, they began to sterilise women during their children's birth regardless of their wishes. Its still a fairly common practice in the hospital.

My mother says that while she was an intern at a hospital, a doctor didn't deliver a baby properly, and ended up breaking the baby's neck. He, and his supervisor tried to get my mother to take the blame, since she would only be reprimanded while he would lose his license. She refused.

On a daily basis in most every hospital in North America, 90-something year old demented people with every disease under the sun - abandoned by their family (or worse, overly attached) - are brought to the operating room for 'emergency surgery' and are cut open by surgeons telling themselves they're doing the right thing by prolonging these people's miserable existences.

I think one of the biggest social changes in my lifetime will have to be how we care for the elderly at end of life.. Our resources simply can't handle the default 'do everything' attitude in North America.

Source: I'm an anesthesia resident.

I once knew an OB who didn't like to work after about 5pm, so at the end of office hours, if they had someone in labor they would swing by labor and delivery and find a reason to do a c-section on them. Sometimes they blamed the baby's heart rate tracing (justified or not), but the classic one would be that they would check the patient's cervix and lie about how dilated it was so it seemed as if labor wasn't progressing rapidly enough, and say "I just don't think this is going to work", cut her, and be home for dinner. Now in OB we love TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and one of the real indications for cesarean is CPD (cephalo-pelvic disproportion), which is where the baby's head is too big for the pelvis. But for this particular doc we always said that they cut patients for CPD (Cesarean Prior to Dinner).

A doctor prescribed chemo for patients who didn't actually have cancer

My mums co-worker stitched his initials into a patient because he was so proud of his work.

Emergency physician here. More than once I've called a surgeon for a patient needing to go to the OR, because they were incredibly ill with some intra-abdominal process or other, and they say "they're really sick, and they're gonna die anyway, if I open them up and they die in the next 30 days that goes against my numbers...so why don't you admit to medicine?" I'm still livid about these cases because while it is true that the patients were likely going to die regardless, the only way they would have any chance at all of making it was by going to the OR. Those surgeons condemned the patients to die because it would hurt their precious statistics. I once, as an intern, was practically screaming at a surgical chief over the phone (if you're in medicine, you know this doesn't happen).

My roommate in dental school was a medical student. There was some big scandal at the hospital he was doing a rotation at because an anesthesiologist left the OR with the nurse anesthetist and left the patient alone. Something went wrong and the patient passed away on the table. Where were the two of them? Getting down in a nearby unused room thinking that nothing could happen in just a few minutes...

There was an old dentist in my home town who was well liked. He was the sort of old timey dentist that wouldn't give you Novocain or anything like that. For anything more complicated than a filling, he would pull the tooth. He preserved the teeth in his basement in a barrel of chemicals to keep it from smelling.

He later put said teeth into a concrete memorial for his dog, thousands and thousands of teeth. After he died everyone learned he wasn't even a licensed dentist.

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/dentists_creepy_pet_project.

So a few years ago I went to the walk in doctor because I thought I had chlamydia. Doctor took a quick look and came to the same diagnosis and wrote me a prescription for some sort of antibiotic. Then he's like "actually I might have some left over from another patient" and proceeds to go into his drawer pull out a bottle full of the right pills and hands them to me. "Take one a day for the next week." I walk out and look at the Orange bottle and see that it still has the previous patients label on it including their full name. That walk in clinic was closed down about a year later, I can't imagine why...

I work in a pharmacy and a doctor was just recently blacklisted from our pharmacy because he was prescribing his "attractive" female patients high doses of opioids to get them a******d. Apparently he was doing it for years before anyone said anything.
Since being black listed he has also been arrested and charged with 13 felonies.

http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/metro-detroit-doctor-charged-in-prescription-pill-scheme/31079776

Not a doctor, but I work in a nursing home. Once I had a patient whose son was a doctor friend of a doctor associated with the nursing home. When her health started to decline, the primary doctor called and ordered sublingual morphine solution 40mg Q1 hour. A normal dose for someone who is opiate-naive (which this woman was) is 5mg Q2-4 hours.

I refused to take this order from the MD and called my supervisor who also refused to take the order. We had to involve the medical director for the facility who decided that 40mg was an unethical dose.

I briefly worked at the front desk clerk for an ER at a local hospital. The rule was the anyone that came in complaining of chest pains had to be back and on a machine within 10 minutes of arrival. Once I entered their name into the system a clock started. So I was told not to enter their name until they had already been taken back to essentially make our numbers look better and make it appear as though they were receiving care within the prescribed 10 minutes.

Edit: People complaining of chest pains were typically brought back quickly, just not always within the 10 minute guideline, although generally faster than anyone else. This mostly seemed to be just about producing better stats. Although keeping it off the system gave them the ability to delay.

MY OPINION: never trust an individual stat, they're almost always manipulated and if you have chest pains take aspirin.

As a specialist who sees a lot of referrals, I see incompetence and laziness (which can be just as devastating) much more than outright unethical behavior.