50 People Share The Most Unprofessional And Disgusting Things A Doctor Has Told Them

We managed to get in touch with the creator of this thread, Redditor MCKlassik, who was kind enough to have a little chat with us. The user revealed they got the idea to post this question and start a discussion on Ask Reddit after their friends started sharing their own unfortunate experiences with medical professionals. “[I] wanted to see if other people have similar stories,” they told Bored Panda.

However, the user did not expect the thread to blow up as much as it did. As of today, the user’s post has amassed nearly 30K upvotes with more than 19K commenters opening up about the inappropriate doctors they ever had the “pleasure” to deal with.

“In terms of going viral, Ask Reddit is hit or miss because so many people post questions every day in hopes of making it to the top. I understand where they’re coming from because Ask Reddit is one of the biggest subreddits on the platform. So I was quite surprised that my post just happened to stand out enough for people to give their stories and to respond to others,” MCKlassik said.

This thread serves as proof that some doctors can seriously cross the line, whether intentionally or not, with what they tell their patients. However, it’s important to remember that many people in the medical field are amazing at their jobs and deserve countless awards for taking care of someone else’s life. It’s reassuring to know that many doctors take extra steps to make sure our physical health and our state of being would be in a good place. MCKlassik believes that when doctors are unprofessional, they don’t do it intentionally. “Sometimes the phrase or action just slips out,” they said.

“Quite frankly, I’m not surprised that doctors can be unprofessional because doctors are human, meaning they’re not perfect,” the user added. “Sometimes a doctor’s negative emotions and comments are brought into their workday due to potential personal issues and let it impact their performance.”

But when patients hear highly inappropriate and extremely ignorant comments from professionals who take care of one of the most important things in their life — their health — it can easily make them feel distraught. Without trust, you have nothing, as they say. So no wonder many people turn to other doctors after living through these uncomfortable experiences, hoping to get better treatment.

We want our physicians to be personal, caring, and understanding. We wish to receive sympathetic smiles and authentic human connection. But it turns out that empathy has been significantly lacking in medicine recently. Over the past few decades, many doctors have developed a reputation for being cold.

More and more patients are coming into contact with medical professionals who treat them more like objects rather than humans. Chris Lovejoy, a physician-in-training at St. George’s Hospital in London, told Quartz that one of the reasons behind it could be that they simply don’t have time to show empathy at work. “Quite easily in medicine, time pressure becomes just another excuse to avoid difficult conversations,” he said.

But while we can sometimes justify their impersonal treatment as an obvious symptom of receiving better expertise and correct diagnosis, compassion is essential in medicine. “Empathy is, and always has been, a core part of medical practice,” Lovejoy added. “I remember a psychiatrist at medical school who would always say ‘the first thing you prescribe to a patient is yourself.‘” We can just hope that we will see more prescriptions of good bedside manner and basic human decency to avoid breaking patients’ trust in the future.