Stupidest advice ever given to you by a Doctor

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

I’m post-menopausal now, but I had a 10-year-long perimenopause from fucking hell. Every possible symptom, I had it. So during one of my regular exams, I asked the doctor about getting a scrip for estrogen. Or something. Anything, to relieve the horrendous bloating and cramps, sweats, mood swings, pimples, tiredness, insomnia, I didn’t care if it raised my risk for breast cancer or whatever. A decade of that crap will wear one down.

He gave me a long lecture about how it was all in my head, menopause really didn’t exist except in my mind, and mentioned female “mass hysteria” and “reading too many womens’ magazines” as possible reasons for my feeling like crap much of the time. It totally didn’t help that he was from somewhere in the Middle East and I couldn’t help but wonder how much his cultural background influenced his attitude towards women. And why he was an ob-gyn doctor with that attitude…I’m sure he meant well but I wanted to punch him in the face.

82

This pales in comparison to the other appendix stories, but my surgeon told me I wouldn’t be able to nurse while on narcotic pain medication, adding in a very condescending tone, “And you’ll NEED to take the medication.” Well fuck him twice, because you can take Vicodin and nurse, AND I took one pill after coming home and didn’t bother with the rest of them.

My college clinic told me I had a cold when I actually had mono. And it was, according to later doctors, a “7 on a scale of 1-10.” Come to think of it, the first doc I saw after coming home to my parents’ told me to take Tylenol to manage the mono symptoms. Er, I had mono hepatitis, so I’m thinking that wasn’t too brilliant.

83

I believe the point is there is nothing wrong, or even unusual, to see a pediatrician until 18. Not that no other docs can take of kids, but pediatricians typically see therir patients until 18 or even older.

By 12 or so I stayed in the room for the consult, but stepped out or the exam.

84

I remembered another one: In 1986 I was pregnant, but was having a miscarriage. This was before internet, and I had neither a regular doctor nor health insurance. I was bleeding heavily and had unbelievablly painful cramps, so I called the 800 “ask a nurse” number. I was advised to take a hot bath to relax me.

When the bathtub filled up with blood, I freaked out and was driven to the nearest hospital. They took all my clothes away, gave me a backless hospital robe and banished my significant other to a waiting room. I was left hemorraging in an exam room. Seriously, there was blood everywhere. When they finally got a doctor in to see me, he had me assume the position, took a quick peek and informed me I was merely having an “unusually heavy period.”

I kicked him in the chest, went nuclear and demanded a real doctor.

85

“Bow ties are cool.”

…no they are not dammit!

86

My grandmother, who probably suffered from bipolar disorder, was told to start smoking to ‘calm her nerves’.

She died of lung cancer.

87

WOW, so far you and the brain tumor one are “winning” this thread. Really sorry this happened to you…I hope it was a swift kick. :stuck_out_tongue:

88

I developed a debilitatingly painful radial tunnel syndrome due to a stressful high workload involving an anti-ergonomic word processing program (anybody remember WordStar?) When the doctor’s order was no typing for six months I was told I was going to be terminated. I went back to see if there was anything else I could do and the hand surgeon told me to “just quit my job because I was married, right?” Well yeah, I’m married, but not to a conservative Mormon doctor like you so I can’t just stay home and pop out a bunch of kids, I need to work if we are going to pay our rent, but thanks for the good thoughts.

89

To be fair, he’s stopped making those claims in recent regenerations. Now he says something more like we can travel to any planet, any place, and time, and no, it’s not safe.

90

Wait, wait a second. He knew you were pregnant but said you were having a PERIOD??? :eek:

91

The first consult I had for my breast reduction said “You’ll need to take at least a week off of work. If you can take more, do it.” This was similar to advice I’d seen online when I was researching the procedure.

The second guy said “I can do this on a Friday and you’ll be back at work on Monday.”

Needless to say, I am going with the first guy.

92

A couple of years ago, my cardiologist swore up and down that having two stents installed in my blocked coronary arteries would improve my quality of life and make my frequent chest pain a thing of the past. He described the procedure in such rosy terms - you lie down, they stick a needle in your groin area, slide the stents up your circulatory system, place them, open them up, and presto change-o everything’s groovy.

What he DIDN’T tell me:

  1. The cath lab at the hospital apparently doubles as a meat locker. And wearing one of those backless robes exposes your nether regions to chillblains.

  2. The meds they give you during the procedure to “calm you” make you see Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco on the ceiling of the cath lab. In full color and complete detail. Without glasses and with severe myopia and astigmatism.

  3. Just sometimes, a stent cannot be placed at all (too much blockage, incompetent tech, who knows?). All I know is, 3 hours later, I had no stents, terminal hypothermia, a big hole in my groin area from the square horse needle they used to run the cath, and a double handful of medication to try to dissolve the blockages chemically. And they didn’t work either.

So I’ll just keep popping my nitro tablets when I get a twinge. And I’ll never set foot in a cath lab again.

93

Drain Bead, technically, that’s true. I’ve had two BR’s. The first one I did go right back to work. Of course, I couldn’t make it through the day and had to go home at 2:00 that first week… The second time, fuck that says I. I took off a week and then only went back half days the following week. Much better.

My first surgeon could qualify for this thread (and not just because I had to have the whole thing re-done a year later), but I’d rather share this story:

When I was fifteen I had really bad pelvic pain and it hurt to walk (any jostling to my innards really hurt). My mom takes me to our family doc. He asks in the intial consultation if I’m sexually active (I was not). Snidely he asks me if I “can answer that question honestly with your mother sitting here?”

Uh, yes. Yes, I can. I am a virgin, sir.

Mom is asked to step out of the exam room. Conveniently, my mom failed to mention on the drive over that he’s going to do a pelvic exam. I’ve never had a pelvic exam. ("You want me to take my panties off and put my feet where???)

So, I’m a little uncomfortable at being so exposed. And in pain. So, when it feels like my doctor is in my vagina up to his elbow, I squirm in pain and recoil away from him.

He yells at me and tells me if I “can’t relax” he’s not going to be able to examine me.

??? Fine by me!

So, after this horrible painful exam, he tells me to get dressed and calls my mother back in. Some time later he comes back in with my “results”.

In the most condescending tone possible, “You have PID. But since you say you’re not sexually active, I don’t know where you could have gotten it.”

What’s worse is that I knew, as a 15-year-old, that there was no way in hell I had PID. Walking back out to the car, my mother asks me, “What’s PID?”

“Uh, it stands for pelvic inflammatory disease, mom. You only get it from a sexually transmitted disease you’ve let go on too long or scar tissue from an abortion.”

“Oh.”

:mad:

94

Without knowing whether or not a second opinion agreed with that doctor or not, there’s no way of knowing whether he was an asshole with an incorrect diagnosis or an asshole who didn’t know that PID can have non-STI/abortion-related causes.

Cite:

Cite:

95

I’d have to go with option number two since he obviously thought I was a lying, diseased-ridden whore.

:eek:

The BV explanation makes sense considering what other symptoms I had through-out my teenage years. And, frankly, resolves that mystery from long ago. If I didn’t have PID, then what did I have? But if BV can cause it, then that answers a lot of questions for me. Especially since I ended up in the ER awhile later with the same symptoms. (I never got the diagnosis on that one, but at least the nurse was nice about asking me if I was sexually active and believed me when I said I wasn’t.)

96

I think a lot of times doctors don’t take patient’s answers to sexual health questions seriously, since they assume people are embarrassed/confused/lying. It’s somewhat understandable, but it can still be infuriating. For example, if you have a possible problem with your girly bits and are in your child-bearing years, they’ll almost never take your word for it that you aren’t pregnant. I supposed they’re worried that if they take your word for it and it turns out that you have an ectopic pregnancy that they miss, then they would be liable.

When I was about 25 years old, I had recurrent vaginal bleeding. Off an on for weeks. I saw my GP and did a few tests (including a pregnancy test, although I told her I hadn’t had sex for years) and was referred to an OB. The OB saw me and said that we should wait a couple months and see if it got better/worse before deciding on treatment. A couple weeks later it got worse (very *heavy * bleeding for a week - not life threatening hemorrhaging, but definitely very heavy). I went to the ER, and although I told them it wasn’t possible that I was pregnant, I saw in my chart that when they did my bloodwork they did two pregnancy tests just to be sure.
This story also has it’s own additional act of doctor stupidity (or at least ignorance):

The resident who saw me in the ER eventually gave me a prescription and told me that I should take it until I could see my OB in a few days. The resident said that the hospital’s on-call OB had recommended a medication that is given to hemophiliacs to stop bleeding. Apparently he told the resident that putting me on hormonal contraceptives immediately would probably stop the bleeding, but there was a chance the hormones would mess with whatever was causing my problem, and therefore make it harder for my regular OB to diagnose me later. So taking the anti-hemophilia med would stop the bleeding and maybe make my later diagnosis easier. (It turned out later that I had an endometrial polyp that was bleeding)

So I took the prescription to the pharmacy, and the pharmacist couldn’t made heads or tails out of the prescription (the name didn’t look like any drug they had ever heard of). She tried calling the hospital, but the resident was off shift by then and couldn’t be reached. I told the pharmacist about how I was told the med is used by hemophiliacs. So together we looked up drugs to treat hemophilia in the huge drug desk reference manual, and figured out that the prescription was for Cyklokapron. The resident had totally mangled the spelling - she talked to the on-call OB over the phone, and didn’t ask him how it should be spelled, and just guessed. :smack:

Also, the prescription was for only a week of Cyklokapron, and it turned out that the cost was several hundred dollars. I was living paycheque to paycheque at the time, and although I had drug coverage through work it was reimbursement only. So I ended up having to call my mom to lend me the money. I guess it would be too much to hope that the doctor would give me a warning that the drug is expensive, when she didn’t know how to spell it and only wrote the prescription because someone else told ehr to.

97

Good grief, the stories in this thread are uniformly terrifying. Why is it so hard to get into medical school if these morons are inflicted on us?

The only kind-of-bad thing I’ve had happen in a medical practice was when the doc who saw me missed the note in my chart that I’m allergic to sulfa drugs and prescribed me Bactrim for a staph infection. Since the first reaction happened when I was a young child, I had no memory of it and didn’t know it was a problem. Fortunately, the allergy is of the “horrible hives and exacerbated side effects” variety and not the “death in minutes” variety, so I merely became itchy and miserable rather than going into anaphylactic shock.

I didn’t even know what the doctor had done until I went back in days later because I was sicker and covered in hives and saw somebody different. I described what had happened to her and she glanced at my chart. “Oh, oops, it says here that you had an allergic reaction to the same drug back in 1991, you should have never been given this. Here, I’ll write it bigger and circle it.” Uh, OK.

98

“Just pop yourself on the table” said the radiologist.
I struggled out of the wheelchair, but was having great difficulty letting go to move the few feet to the table as unsupported I was in quite a bit of pain. I asked her if she could move me a little closer to the table. I guess she was in the process of actually reading my notes. I’d fallen thirty feet out of a tree. X-ray confirmed minor crush fractures to two vertebrae. She freaked out. No harm done though.

99

Mine is nothing near anything as serious as anything here. But this is the story…

I was interested in a chemical peel, so I asked the dermatologist what I would look like afterward…“Oh, like you had a bad sunburn.” says she. Well, fine, thinks I, a bad sunburn doesn’t preclude me from going to work. I don’t need to take leave, or anything.

Um, yeah. When she said “Bad sunburn”, what she meant was “Pieces of your face will fall off.” I wore thick, kabuki style makeup for a week while large chunks of skin literally fell off my face…at the worst of it, I had to reapply during the middle of the day because large bits of exposed skin were pink, after dead chunks of skin had fallen off.

That being said, I loved the results, and would do it again…but I would definitely take some leave, this time!

100

Well, to be fair he only had my word for it at that point…when I was admitted I told them I was about two months pregnant but they hadn’t yet done blood tests or anything. It was pretty clear to me I was miscarrying, plus there was blood and clots (sorry TMI) everywhere in the exam room. I was hemorrhaging copiously. They left me there for a while and the cramps were so bad I was walking in circles to ease the pain.

They ended up doing a d and c and keeping me for a couple of days.