“So You Want To Look WEIRD?!”: 52 Unacceptable Things Patients Were Actually Told By Their Doctors

he relationship between a doctor and a patient is only as good as the communication holding it together, and the numbers suggest that is not going well. A survey by Artera, covering over 2,000 patients, found that 43% report their health being negatively affected by communication problems with their provider.

Around 60% would consider switching doctors over a bad communication experience. And 81% of dissatisfied patients end up having to call the office directly because the official systems are too limited to actually help them. The appointments in the thread ahead represent the extreme end of this, but they are not anomalies.

Women make up a significant portion of the thread, and that is not a coincidence. Research on the gender pain gap is shocking, to say the least. More than half of women report negative healthcare encounters, including having their pain minimized or dismissed, compared to 39% of men presenting with identical symptoms.

A UK study found that 62% of women feel their pain complaints have been ignored by medical professionals, and that when women's pain is acknowledged, doctors are significantly more likely to prescribe sedatives or refer them to psychiatric care rather than run physical diagnostic tests. And a shocking two-thirds of women report being told at some point that their physical symptoms were exaggerated or purely psychological. For heart attacks specifically, women are seven times more likely to be misdiagnosed and sent home. Disgusting.

And if you carry a few extra inches around your waist, weight bias is another thing you need to worry about. Between 69% and 80% of adults with obesity report experiencing weight stigma directly from a healthcare provider, making doctors the second most common source of weight bias in their lives after family members.

A systematic review found that more than half of all health professionals carry explicit or implicit weight bias, with many subconsciously viewing higher-weight patients as lazy or noncompliant. Research from the UConn Rudd Center found that 53% of patients have received shaming comments about their weight from a doctor. When this happens, the actual problem stops being investigated, and early signs of unrelated conditions get missed entirely.

The "it's probably just anxiety" diagnosis has ended careers in its own way. A major study published in Rheumatology tracked over 3,400 patients with Systemic Autoimmune Rheumatic Diseases and found that nearly half had their early physical symptoms explicitly misattributed to anxiety or stress before receiving a correct diagnosis.

Endometriosis, which affects roughly one in ten women, carries an average diagnostic delay of 8.6 years, during which the majority of patients are told their severe pelvic pain is normal menstrual stress or general anxiety. Women presenting to emergency rooms with microvascular heart disease or atypical heart attack symptoms are twice as likely as men to be told they are having a panic attack. The anxiety label is not always wrong. It is, however, frequently deployed as a conversation-ender rather than a diagnosis.

Just when we think there is no more bias to consider, racial bias enters the chat. One of its most disturbing drivers is a set of biological myths that have no scientific basis and should not exist in any medical training program. A landmark study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 50% of white medical students and residents endorsed at least one false biological belief about Black patients.

Between 40% and 60% believed Black people have thicker skin and 12% believed they have less sensitive nerve endings. Excuse me, what?! Trainees who held these beliefs consistently rated Black patients' pain as lower and made less accurate treatment recommendations. These are current medical students, not uninformed quacks from the Middle Ages.

The most frustrating part of all of this is how rarely it results in any formal consequence. According to data from the Federation of State Medical Boards, 69% of Americans do not even know that a state medical board is the correct place to report a doctor's conduct, which means the vast majority of incidents never get filed at all.

Of those who are actively dissatisfied with their care, only 25% actually intend to file a formal complaint. In one large-scale tracking study covering nearly 750,000 patient consultations, only 484 resulted in formal complaint letters. That is 0.065% of all clinical encounters. There is a higher chance your complaint will end up on a Bored Panda list than it will actually end up on the desk of a board memeber.