Lawsuit?
This seems like absolute horse crap, and I wouldn’t put up with it. I wonder if it’s reasonable for you to pursue legal recourse against this fool for any medical treatment you incur now that you’re 8 months past due and possibly worse off than you were before the “gout attack”…
I had the exact opposite issue. My wrist was hurting like a sonofabitch, to the point that I was making audible pain noises in the office. I went to urgent care and she prescribed relafen and augmentin. What? I told her the pain had been really really mild for a few weeks, but then became excruciating. She ordered an X ray, which I thought unnecessary. By late afternoon the pain was so bad that I went for the X ray. Nothing there.
I went back to the same urgent care and there was a different doctor there, she asked about gout, and I told that I’d had similar pain in my feet a long time ago. She prescribed prednisone, no pain killer :mad:. That night was awful, but the pain started to fade in the next few days.
People here have said that gout pain can be worse than giving birth… I don’t doubt it. Not because I think giving birth isn’t that painful, but because when I tweaked a limb in exactly the wrong way with gout, the pain was indescribable.
This is insane - four months?
Spider bites are quite rare, and don’t look anything like most other things. That doctor is a quack. Don’t go to him.
Pretty much any colloquial “spider bite” is a type of boil and staph infection. I found this out because, well, my sister gets those boils often, due to her bad skin being great for hosting those stupid bugs.
Oh, yeah - misdiagnosing bad skin problems.
Shortly after moving to Indiana I had a nasty boil/infection. This wasn’t too long after I’d been through a round of them, not too long after my Epic Zit From Hell Requiring Surgery “adventure”. Since I didn’t have a local doctor I went to an “urgent care center”.
The doctor there was convinced I had diabetes. Nevermind I had had annual physicals since forever, been checked during recent medical issues, and always tested with completely normal blood sugar levels. I simply had to have diabetes! (Because only diabetics get skin infections? :rolleyes: ) Well, I consented to a fingerstick then a fasting/blood test and after all that … completely, absolutely normal. OK, I think, it’s not diabetes, let’s look for something else, right?
Nope, the doctor said the tests had to be in error, I clearly had diabetes, do them all over again.
I told him to his face it was time to consider other possibilities than diabetes, which multiple tests showed I did not have. The I got up and walked out and found a doctor who was willing to treat the infection.
45 years ago I developed a boil on the back of my neck that really stunk bad. My wife finally talked me into seeing a doctor about it. He poked around on it a little bit and the whole room was filled with the worst odor imagineable.
He said “You have an infected boil. Here is an antibiotic prescription. If it doesn’t get better after a couple weeks, come back and see me, that will be $10 please”
Now $10 doesn’t sound like much (and with the prescription it was closer to $15)…but in today’s terms it was like $150 .
A couple weeks went by and I was still stinking up the place. Should I go back to the doctor and pay another $10 plus?
Decided NO WAY. Told my wife to hold her nose and dig that boil out. She did. Turned to be a humongous ingrown hair inside it. Slapped some alchohol on the deep wound (no Neosporin back then). Awful smell was gone immediately and within a couple days it had completely healed.
… Still have the scar from my wife’s “surgery”
Oh man, I have a good string of string of stories. I think I’ll tell them all. TL;DR: I have a bit of mistrust when it comes to doctors.
When I was two years old and trying to potty train, I couldn’t hold it through the night and always wet the bed.Wetting the bed during a short nap is one of my earliest memories. This went on for over a year, eventually getting to the point where I had no control at all. After many a visit to the doctor, many of whom told my mother that I was still learning and would figure it out eventually, I was finally diagnosed with the kidney infection from hell.
When I was 13, I wanted to play basketball and had to go in for a physical. The doctor had some medical students doing the easy stuff and I got one very excitable student for my physical that day. He spent a long time testing all the various things and finally was listening to my heart. He got very excited about this and listened to my heart various ways. He then left without saying a word, grabbed my normal doctor and ALL the other students. They all took turns listening to my heart in various different ways without a word of explanation. The doctors were listening to my physiological heart murmur. Apparently, my mother didn’t even know about this and was shocked when the doctor was like “Oh, yeah, that’s normal for her.” Good thing my heart murmur isn’t dangerous or anything.
When I was 15, I started have severe stomach upset with vomiting and diarrhea. I lost a significant amount of my body weight. My parents sent me to the doctor and the doctor had me keep a food journal to help figure out what was going on. At least, that’s what he said to my face. To my parents, he told them I was just stressed and that some B12 would help ease the symptoms. Turns out I have IBS and dairy was starting to trigger symptoms. The guy didn’t even read my journal.
When I was in college, I got bronchitis several times. I didn’t take very good care of myself and frequently let things go longer than they needed to. About a week after going to the student health center on campus and being diagnosed with bronchitis, I woke up and found I had an excruciating pain in my chest. I couldn’t breathe or walk or talk or move or think too hard without horrible pain. After suffering through a 3 hour long lab, I made an appointment at the health center because something was obviously horribly wrong. Since I was in such horrible pain, I didn’t take care to make sure I got the same doctor I had last week and instead booked the first time I could get in. When I saw this new doctor, from now on Dr. Insensitive Dick, he spent a good 15 minutes chastising me for not seeing the other doctor. I explained that I wanted to see someone sooner and that she wouldn’t be available until late in the day. Dr. Insensitive Dick said that horrific pain is not a valid reason to have not made an appointment with her. He then called some pain killers over to the campus pharmacy and shooed me out like I was just a waste of his time. It ended up being a pulled muscle from vigorous coughing but it was still really painful and Dr. Insensitive Dick was an insensitive dick.
And, finally, this story is still unfolding. I am overweight from years of overeating and not exercising enough. My health insurance does not cover weight loss programs through a doctor but it does have a nice little accountability service to help counsel people. I started seeing my current doctor about a year ago. I went to her for my acid reflux but she was more interested in my weight. We had a string of appointments where she would test for various things and every appointment we would talk about my weight and how I needed to lose some. Every time the conversation turned toward weight, she would try to prescribe me something to help me lose weight and I would have to remind her than I couldn’t talk to her about it because my insurance wouldn’t pay for it. Finally, early this year, I decided to get serious about my weight when my period stopped. I went my doctor because my period stopped but we again circled around back to weight and she drew blood to test my thyroid and my blood sugar and prescribed me phentermine to help me lose weight. After a month, I came back and she found that my thyroid levels were out of normal. But that apparently wasn’t disconcerting to her because all we talked about was my weight. I had to remind her that I was concerned about my period and my thyroid and she prescribed me synthroid to push my metabolism a little. Yeah, the synthoid isn’t to correct the fact that my thyroid isn’t working, it’s to push my metabolism a little. On top of that, she billed my insurance for weight loss visits and now I have to shell out $139 for each one. Thanks Doc!
On the bright side, my A1C levels are perfect. They’ve been perfect every time she tested them. She’s tested my A1C levels every times she’s drawn blood.
It’s never lupus, though.
I had one doctor who was convinced that every medical problem I had was because I needed to lose weight. Yeah, that ear infection was because I was fat. Never mind that I’ve been having ear infections ever since I was a skinny kid.
The doctor who really stands out in my memory, though, is the one who told me that I needed to read my Bible every day. After I told him I was an atheist, he got even more insistent about this, and said that I REALLY needed to read the Bible, and join a church. I finally told him that I had become an atheist when I was very active in a church, and reading a Bible daily. Yeah, I found another doctor as soon as I could.