Or seen? Inspired by a recent thread about burns and…well, you can have a look and make your own judgements about the quality of certain advice there.
But given the amount of woo floating about we’re going have to narrow this one down - to advice given to you or one of your friends/loved ones about a specific condition you have or had that turned out to be complete crap.
I’ve been pretty lucky with my health so far, touch wood, in that I’ve not had any serious chronic problems but the worst advice I’ve ever gotten a few years ago and followed is when I was getting shin splints from running to ‘tough it out’, ignore the pain and keep running when what I should’ve been doing is the precise opposite - resting and letting it heal. Felt like my shin bones were about to snap. Learned a lesson about trying to be macho when your body is crying out for mercy, though.
Not sure if it’s what you mean, but Bear Bryant, the deified football coach at Alabama 50-odd years ago, was famous for his theory that not allowing his players to drink water during practice (hours long in the brutal Alabama summers) would make them tougher.
That sure is bad advice, though I was thinking more personal experiences you or your family/friends have had with a health condition where someone gave you advice about it which if followed would violate the most basic premise of medicine, primum non nocere.
An overwhelming majority of the medical concerns I have had in my lifetime have resolved themselves spontaneously. Once, I did go to a doctor, a very wise one, and he said “The human body is pretty good at taking care of itself”.
The worst I can recall is my sister’s admonition about avoiding sunscreen because it supposedly is harmful (she proudly related that none of her children* ever used it).
This, from the child of a dermatologist (her mother, who probably was doing somersaults in her grave as a result).
*including a son who played a lot of sports and had ambitions to be a tennis pro.
When I was 16 I was having a lot of chest pain and made an appointment to see my doctor. He eventually diagnosed me with a “trick heart”. He said “you know, some people have a trick knee, you have a trick heart”.
After years of on and off chest pain I was properly diagnosed (by another doctor) with having Costochondritis.
I’ve met a few in medical fields who thought that drinking 8 cups of water a day (but only water counts, no other beverage or liquid from food counts) is a cure for a wide range of ailments.
Dentist sent me to a periodontist to get his opinion on a couple of areas where my gums had receeded more than is typical for someone my age with otherwise good oral health.
Periodontist poked around and announced that I needed grafts to shore up the gums in all four quarters of my mouth (upper/lower, right/left). Without this procedure, which he described as “painful and expensive” (his words), I would surely lose all my teeth. He and his assistant urged me to schedule an appointment as soon as possible. I thanked them, paid, and left without making an appointment.
A month or so later I got a letter from the periodontist reminded me about my dreadful condition and the need for the procedure. I sent a copy of the letter to my dentist saying, basically, “WTF, you’ve never mentioned anything urgently wrong with my mouth, what’s up with this guy?” The dentist agreed that whatever was going on, it didn’t require a mouth full of grafts.
Twenty years and several dentists later, no one else has suggested that there’s anything unusual going on with my gums, let alone a need for surgery.
I knew this woman that was around 20 yo and she went to the doctor b/c her breast was hurting and the doctor told her she had ‘cancer’ and it needed to removed ! The woman was living in Ca. and she decided to go back home to Boston and get a second opinion . She went to a new doctor and after his
examination he asked what has she been doing lately and she listed some things then said she was learning how to play pool . :smack: The quack in Ca.
was going to cut off her breast b/c it was hurting from getting bumped into by the pool Q stick. That Dr had to been knife happy or wanted to made so easy $$
The worst wasn’t for me but for something a family member did to themselves. My ex-SIL was a former chemical engineer who had breast cancer in her early 30’s. She became completely convinced that “chemicals” were the root of all health problems and Western medicine was invalid even though it saved her the first time.
She somehow became a reputable clinical psychologist and a fully tenured college professor as a second career. She specialized in health psychology of all things. You would think that would be helpful when her father got prostate cancer in his 70’s but, no, it was the worst thing that could happen. She convinced him that he could “cure” himself with vitamin packs that she put together herself. We are talking 30 - 40 vitamins a day. Thankfully, a trusted family doctor and friend intervened and forced my FIL to get the routine surgery that would save his life and bodily functions before it was too late.
There was no such luck when her own cancer returned in her mid-50’s. Even though it was completely treatable in the early stages, she denied that she had it at all and refused treatment for something she claimed she didn’t have. It took many plane flights from family members to even get her to go see a doctor but it was much too late for that. She still claimed there was nothing wrong even when she was emaciated, dying and jaundiced in the hospice awaiting death which came in a few weeks. The doctors were frustrated because her cancer was easily treatable if she ever admitted she had it but there was nothing they could do at that point. She died a painful death at 56.
Her 21 year old daughter had to drive her coffin up in the back of their pickup truck from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire for a farm burial next to her dad who had died just two years earlier from Alzheimer’s. It was incredibly sad because she was orphaned at a young age. There was nothing anyone could do for her father but her mother didn’t have to die if she had just sought any sort of treatment from a competent doctor.
Nobody ever accused her of being dumb but, it just goes to show you, how even very smart people can become blinded to their own reality.
While not exactly “Medical Advice” as “instructions to patient”, this one is hard to top:
Mother is feeling poorly at age 72. MD starts work-up (such as it is in Hicksville USA). Among the results: Low Sodium.
Sister: “What’s the big deal? Give her salt tablets!”
I am not certain if she actually attended college, or just moved there to Husband Hunt.
I do know she never worked a day in her life (yes kids, the “pretty middle class girls who marries male and lives off his income her entire life” is within living memory). But I would have though that even being near a school would cause “Treat Disease, Not Symptom” to rub off.
Mother had cancer if the lungs and was dead a few months later.
My dental insurance company. It was so bad it was like not having insurance at all. My dental surgeon called them after they refused to OK the procedure. It involved having all of my wisdom teeth extracted at once and the insurance company told him (remember he is a dental surgeon) not to do it because only one tooth was broken despite the fact that my lower wisdom teeth were growing sideways into the other teeath.
BUT the worst one was BCBS insurance. My son broke a tooth late Sunday night and we called the insurance and it was transferred to the nurse on duty who was "HOLY SHITPOTATOES!!! HE NEEDS TO GO TO THE EMERGENCY RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!! So after a few hours there the doctor was like what do you want me to do? Take him to a dentist tomorrow. When I called BCBS to complain that their retarded advice cost me a couple of hundred dollars they said they we not responsible. The medical professional’s advice was just that - advice. It was our choice to follow it.
Sure, that’s hard to top, but then there’s the next post.
“What’s the worst medical advice you’ve ever heard”:
Obviously, it’s difficult, if not impossible to give any real advice from here, but if you had/have medical insurance they may have paid it out. Every medical policy I’ve had, while excluding dental procedures have always included ‘emergency’ dental procedures, sometimes (always?) done at a hospital.
Your policy, which you may be able to find online, probably deals with this. Off the top of my head, I think mine says (but I’d have to look to be sure) that emergency dental situations will be covered if they are done in the ER and just enough work is covered to make sure the patient will be okay until they can get to a regular dentist.
I tried looking at my policy but since my medical policy now covers very basic dental stuff, it doesn’t really say. But like I said, I seem to recall that my prior policies covered emergency dental care. Sometimes it’s worth (if you didn’t) reading your actual policy, even if it’s after the fact. Remember, if insurance company can easily convince you that they’re not responsible, it’s a win for them.
BTW, if this was less than a few years ago and it turns out it should have been covered, you can probably appeal it.
Also, one last thing, and this is just ‘in general’. It’s always good to have the phone number of the person that administers your policy. At my work, that’s me. I have access to a more extensive version of the policy (and, to be honest, I just keep the policy more handy, I can get at it in the middle of the night when you probably can’t or don’t have time). Plus, I can call (or give you the phone number) for our insurance broker who has some ‘back door’ ways of calling people at the insurance company that are way more knowledgeable about your policy than the random person that picks up the phone when you call the number on the card. I always tell people that if they have a question about the ins and outs of the policy, talk to me, I’ve read that stupid thing front to back enough times and I have access to more resources than they do (some of which I can just put them in direct contact with and step out of the way).
All that being said, to be on the safe side, I always have to say ‘of course you should go get help’, barring something minor, I can’t say ‘nah man, just bleed all night and wait until morning’. I feel bad sometimes, but I can’t be the one responsible for telling someone not to go in. As a food service place, a few times a year I’ll have someone calling me telling me that we gave them food poisoning, based on a few questions, I’ll feel reasonably sure that they either don’t have it or it wasn’t us (and in 35 years we have yet to give anyone food poisoning, BTW). But when someone calls me and says ‘I’ve had diarrhea and vomiting for the last 2 hours, should I go to the hospital?’ What am I supposed to say? Can’t say ‘no’? Not a single person has ever, once, called back to tell me that they did, in fact, have food poisoning (at least from me) and all the people that were adamant, positive, guaranteed that I gave them food poisoning, absolutely refused to go the ER or even let me put them in touch with our local heath department. Funny how that works out. I’ve seen that in other cases as well, it’s funny how often someone claims we harmed them, but as soon as you put something between ‘you harmed me’ and ‘here’s some free stuff’, you know, like ‘we need to prove/document it and then go through the proper channels, but, I assure you, you’ll be taken care of’, that’s always the end of it, each and every time.
Yes, “Go to a doctor” was in many cases very bad advice, and in most cases, uselss advice. Meanwhile, I have recovered perfectly from every single one of the complaints I’ve ever had for which I did not go to a doctor.
Worst case, a doctor over-aggressively put me on blood pressure medication, resulting in a sudden drop in blood pressure, which coupled with my cup-to-disc ratio, triggered sudden and irreversible blindness in one eye. Same doctor put me on cyanocobalamin for vitamin B-12 deficiency, which had no effect, and my present doctor calls it a placebo.
I quit going to doctors for kidney stones, because all they did was a series of annoying tests I was in no mood for to verify that they were kidney stones, then tell me to wait for them to pass. For Hep-A, go home and get plenty of rest, you’ll recover. I did. For Retinitis Pigmentosa, doctors advive was apply for disbility, you’ll get worse and be blind forever. Sciatica, I was referred to a pain specialist, he wanted to give me a steroid shot and do surgery if that didn’t work. I said let’s try PT, he said OK, and with PT it went away and never came back. Othrewise, I look up antibiotics on internet for the condition I have, but pharmacies won’t give them to me until I go and let a doctor defraud Medicare and give me a script.
I won’t go to a doctor unless I absolutely have to (not every time somebody says “Go see a doctor”), and that policy has worked 100% of the time for 77 years.
I was having pain when I had sex. Like menstrual cramping kind of pain. It was not a new partner or anything.
So I went to see a doctor. Mind you, I was forty years old at the time, and let’s just say that I came of age in the 1980s and that era was a fun, adventurous time. Heh.
So this older male doctor tells me, “Well, when a woman gets nervous during marital relations it can sometimes be painful.”
I’m like: No. It was painful once, when I was 16. I don’t think that’s the problem now.
My Aunt went to a GP looking for treatment of her depression.
The GP prescribed an SSRI and said, ‘‘If that doesn’t work, you’re probably bipolar.’’
I’m still scratching my head about that one, considering my Aunt has never behaved in any way that suggests mania. Incidentally, I have pretty strong feelings about GPs prescribing psychotropic medications. It’s clear many of them don’t know the DSM from their asshole.
Also, ever since I moved back to Michigan, I have received an exorbitant amount of recommendations for cannabis oil. I have a friend who is riddled with brain and bone cancer and I got a straight-faced directive to recommend cannabis oil to my dying friend. Everybody knows someone who cured their cancer with cannabis oil. WTF.