23 Surprising Times Doctors Were Wrong and Patients Were Right

‘I was having seizures in my sleep my entire life’
23 Surprising Times Doctors Were Wrong and Patients Were Right

I’m not going through a solid decade of school just to get one of the most stressful jobs I can think of. I’m simply not built that way. I am, however, very thankful that some people are, and that they’ve decided to be doctors and help food poisoning from suspect sushi. I don’t envy them, and their days are filled with sick and injured people. People are hard enough to deal with at the front of a Chipotle line, much less when they’re worried they’re in the middle of a cardiac event. 

So I can understand doctors sometimes not believing the farfetched diagnoses patients come in with, co-written by a heaping helping of panicked googling. Once in a while, though, it turns out that the patient was spot on. A Redditor asked doctors on Reddit for situations like these that have cropped up throughout their careers, and those below were actually brave enough to it them.

I was at the brief internment unit (acute psychotic cases, mostly) and there was this woman that had been there for some time, she had paranoid delusions about the Russian mob trying to get her, complete with hallucinations and everything, her family had confirmed it was all made up in her head and nobody was following her. She had been getting medication for some time and her symptoms had improved a lot, she no longer believed she was in danger or being hunted, and everything seemed to be going well. As the procedure usually goes, the staff ed her family
ChameleonMami . 3y ago Patient stated live cockroach in ear. I said probably not and ate my words.
monday-next 3y ago My parents met when they were both teaching in a small rural town. The local doctor was notorious for diagnosing everyone with appendicitis. Headache? Must be appendicitis. Broke your toe? Appendicitis. Got a mystery rash? Have you considered getting your appendix out? One day the sports teacher went to see the doctor with abdominal pain. The doctor diagnosed him with indigestion and told him to go home and rest. The pain kept getting worse and worse, until eventually the teacher decided to drive an hour to the nearest hospital. Turned out his appendix had burst and the
When I did a rotation in pediatric radiology, we had this father coming in with his kid. The kid was about 5, wouldn't eat properly and throw up a lot, and was very slim. I read their file and it stated that they were in and out of the hospital a lot for the same issue over the last half year or so, but no cause was ever found. It even said the father suspected his kid might have ingested something, but since the symptoms were so unspecific, this lead was never followed. So this time it seems they must
legodarthvader Зу ago Edited Зу ago Early in my GP career. Young girl came in with a skin lesion on her forearm. I did a close examination and did not find any significant concerning features, promptly told her it looks benign. She then told me to look again and that it had changed in colour. I took that as a warning sign and did a punch biopsy. Turned out to be a dermatofibrosarcoma protuberans. I now have very low threshold to offer patients a biopsy of lesion if it even has any remote possibility of being something nasty.
pierremanslappy Зу ago 00 Obligatory not a doctor but worked as developer for a medical alarm company (think Help I've fallen and I can't get up) and had a woman call my extension by accident complaining there was somebody calling through her device and threatening her. Notes on her said she was schizophrenic and had this issue multiple times. She told me that she knows she hears things but I'd put her mind at ease if I could find out in anyway so I pull up the logs on cellular usage and see hundreds of calls and texts messages
docmahi 3y ago Recently patient with 70+ min downtime from cardiac arrest with all the signs of a big anoxic brain injury. Told the family that honestly there is no chance she has a meaningful recovery. She proved me wrong next day was off the vent and talking - I fixed her heart artery and she's doing great now.
emptysee Зу ago I work in vet med. This thread is wild because my patients can't even speak and we're doing rads and full bw on a regular basis and almost every post here is someone who can't get a diagnostic until they're half dead but they can speak and tell their symptoms and advocate for themselves, it's crazy my friend has a brain tumor but couldn't get any imaging done for weeks but her dog got cancer and got in the next morning
Remixthefix 3y ago From the patient. Severe night terrors, migraines, sore muscles, rapid weight changes. My mom would bring me into the clinics and ers and no one did anything. More than once I was accused of faking it to miss school, or of having a drug problem as young as 10 years old. Moved in with my first boyfriend at 19. Не started coming to Dr appointments because he swore I was dying in my sleep. Tests were run, but all normal until he just started dialing the ambulance every time | was dying. At 24 | was finally
BobknobSA 3y ago Patient here. Told anesthesiologist that the general anesthetic was absurdly painful. Не treated me like I was being a baby. Не then paralyzed my lungs. His iv missed my vein and I didn't get any general. I was fully awake and suffocating while flopping around like a dying fish. Last thing I before I ed out was the surgeon telling the anesthesiologist that I wouldn't anything anyway. Wrong.
Carinne89 Зу ago Nurse here. I tell my students this one a lot. Had a very difficult long term dementia patient that some idiot higher up decided was appropriate to put in a four patient ward on an acute care floor (so people recovering from surgery ect. Not all dementia). This patient would scream and throw herself out of bed routinely all night. Finally got a sleeping pill ordered, and gave it three nights in a row as she wouldn't stop screaming about the rats climbing on her and waking up the entire ward and the NICU on the other
froststorm56 3y ago Family medicine doc here I have a really hard time because I generally believe my patients and want to find out what is wrong with them, and then I send them to a specialist to get tests that I'm not allowed to order and they're dismissed and not taken seriously. It's extremely frustrating.
1834927651892 3y ago 3 year old kid with gastro, mother says the kid is floppy and weak but during examination he was climbing furniture and doing normal kid stuff. All objectively normal as far as its possible to do a Neuro exam on an uncooperative 3 year old. Advised to encourage fluids and small frequent meals, prescribed ondansetron and moved on COS its a busy ED with ambulances lining up by the minute. 24 hrs later he re-presents completely flaccid, gets intubated and flown to a tertiary centre. Turns out there's a super rare autoimmune reaction to certain GI pathogens
NyxAffinity Зу ago Nurse here! I have many a story but one sticks out in particular. I work in elderly care and had a patient I had looked after for years. She had advanced dementia and would often go into a very sleepy and unresponsive state for a day or two. During one of these periods a dr had come in to do rounds and general reviews for my patients and insisted that the patient was palliative and wanted to use a syringe driver (end of life medications via automated syringe) as she wasn't responding to voices and hadn't been
Saw 3 patients in a row who were clearly lingers (malingerers, using the military medical system to get out of work without actually being sick or injured.) Patient number 4 comes in and says basically she doesn't have any other symptoms but her ears are kinda sore and she wanted time off work. I instantly thought Linger number 4 then and was very dismissive. Had to run every caase through a medical SGT who asked me if I'd actually done a full assessment before dismissing her. itted no and they rightfully told me off and made me go back and
umopap1sdn . 3y ago The average endometriosis patient has her pain dismissed for seven years before diagnosis. In my case it was only diagnosed after a life-threatening complication, which developed about a quarter century after my symptoms first appeared.
lizzardqueen14 3y ago RT here. We had an intoxicated patient come into the ER with with an eyebrow laceration. She was telling the doc her boyfriend had shot her, but we all thought she was being dramatic. It looked like she just took a good slug to the face, and she got stitched up. An X- ray was done to check for a fracture and I'll be damned there was a .22 that popped up on it. It had hit her orbital and kind of bounced off to the point it stayed outside her skull but under the skin. You
BigChonkyPP 3y ago Not the doc (thank god) but a story I heard from a friend whos a nurse. Basically a woman in her early 30s kept coming to the ER insisting she was really sick. Basically sick all the time for about a year and a half. For whatever reason they assumed she was drug seeking and just wrote her off. Most likely due to her age VS the severity of symptoms described. Well eventually they do find something, biopsy it, and stage 4 cancer. Could have been entirely prevented if theyd just taken her seriously from the beginning.
Phenomenal2313 3y ago DO Clinical Pharmacist here , a caveat here A patient comes to the ER walks calmy and blankly tells me, he has an ice pick stabbed on his back from a fight with his drunk neighbor I'm like you get stabbed with an ice pick, you should be DOA, patient decided to take his shirt off and behold a fukcing ice pick stuck on his back Emergency surgery and of the nurse goes near me and says You fucked up
CreativeSun0 3y ago I'm a nurse, I work in ED and remote so I often have quite a large scope and autonomy. I can't recall any specific instances. I have learnt a few valuable lessons. The old man who says he doesn't need to be there and is only there because his wife made him is probably dying. Likewise with the old lady who comes into ED and appologises for 'taking a bed someone else needs more than I do'. First time mums who are worried their kid are sick, it's probably nothing. But by kid number 3, if mum
SikkWitlt10 Зу ago Edited Зу ago Nurse here. That shit happens all the time. Hell, we had one patient who was thrashing around in bed with a heart rate in the 140s and respiration in the 40s. The patient was obviously in respiratory distress, and the doc ordered Haldol to calm him down. No sir this patient obviously needs to be intubated, but of course, the doctor didn't want to do that. Us nurses have to fight with doctors a decent amount to get shit done. At least that is what is true for me and my previous hospital on
3y ago Doctor here, I obviously can't speak for all individual practitioners (some of us really are dickheads) but sometimes there's a communication issue between the intended message of it's probably a viral bug, there's nothing to be done for now, go home but come back to me if xyz happens and the received message by the patient of go home, there's nothing to be done. Fortunately I work in ER with kids so I'm humbled by my own incorrectness frequently enough to not be an arse every time I explain that these are the sniffles and they'll
BigBadZord a 3y ago It didn't get serious under my father's care, he just thought she was joking at first. Не was treating a woman for headaches aaaaaaand she dropped that she had been the getaway driver in a robbery where shots had been fired. Bullet was lodged in base of her skull.

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