The next time you get yourself in a difficult medical situation…just let a doctor handle it. There’s a reason why they went through years of medical school.
So, listen up to these doctors on Reddit who shared stories of the dumbest patients they ever encountered.
Caution: extreme stupidity ahead.
1. Bite The Sun
“I’m a general practitioner, and the most outrageous thing I’ve heard was from a boy who was something like 20-22 years old. He was from an impoverished, illiterate family. The boy had a bad case of tonsillitis and refused to take any medication because all he needed to do was ‘bite the sun.’ Basically, at noon, he had to look up to the sun, open his mouth as wide as possible and ‘bite’ the sun several times so it would ‘burn’ his tonsils and cure him over the course of a couple of weeks. When that wouldn’t work, plan B was to do the same at night but only under a full moon.”
2. Yikes
“I had a 34-year-old who popped a pimple on his privates with a needle after cleaning it by putting it in his mouth. Yeah, he ended up losing everything.
A 72-year-old recently had a heart stent placement and started having similar chest pain at night around 10 p.m.
He decided to stay in all night and try to sleep through it. He popped ten aspirin overnight and came to an urgent care instead of a hospital. He was not doing so hot when he left our care.
Another guy, a mid-20s male shot his junk off.
Now he lives with a hole in it.
This other time a young female jumped off the balcony just so that she can get some pain meds. I loaded her up and intubated her.
A guy had a room freshener spray stuck in his butt.
They had to take him to the operating room. I don’t know what he was thinking. It’s a vacuum when you shove stuff up there!
Another good one was when this dude pulled out his catheter just because he was angry at medical staff.
Yeah, that didn’t help with the situation. He realized later what mistake he made and how painful it’s going to be for him for a while.”
3. His butt hurt
“In the wee hours of the morning, a doctor friend of mine got called to see a trauma consult. It was a guy who reportedly wandered into the ER stating he’d just come from a bus stop across the street from the hospital.
He had just woken up there and realized that he was missing his wallet… as well as all of his clothing from the waist down.
What, you ask, would prompt an indecently-clothed man to march barefoot across a busy downtown road, in a big city, by the dawn’s early light to seek assistance in the ER?
Shame be condemned… his butt hurt.
My friend did an appropriate workup and discovered a large chunk of broken-off concrete lodged in this gentleman’s rectum. It required an operation to retrieve it. However, before they whisked him off to the OR, the patient confessed the rest of the story:
He’d hooked up with two strange men off of Craigslist, and they’d gone out in one guy’s awesome sports car, used copious amounts of illicit substances, and done… well, at that point, he wasn’t too sure just what they’d done.
All he remembered was waking up at the bus station with no pants and a rock up his butt.
While my friend was still in the ER with the guy getting consent for the operation… the patient’s very worried wife walked in.”
4. Google Master
“I am an ER doctor and recently had a young male patient who came in for about the fifth time complaining of abdominal pain and vomiting. Looking over his records from past visits, I could see that his symptoms had previously been attributed to either acid reflux and gastritis or cyclic vomiting syndrome due to daily heavy substance use. Anyway, he’d been told to take Nexium twice a day and cut back on the drinking, as well as follow up with a GI doctor, but he had done none of those things.
Instead, he tells me, ‘Doc, I Googled my symptoms and I’m sure I have stomach cancer. My mom has cancer too, so she gave me some of her chemo-therapy pills and I started taking those.’
So, yeah, guy ignored the medical diagnoses and recommendations he was given and instead decided he had stomach cancer and treated himself by taking his mother’s chemotherapy pills. He wasn’t sure what kind of cancer his mom had.
I tried to explain that different cancers require different medications, that chemotherapies are the most toxic medications we made and might kill him. He was very unlikely at his age to have stomach cancer and much more likely to have over-production of stomach acid for which he should take the medicines he was prescribed the last several times he came to the ER.”
5. A drinking emergency
“Had an old coot (best possible description of the man) who was sweet but had spent his adult years drinking away whatever brain cells he had when he started. He presented with the chief complaint, ‘I can’t drink anymore. Every time I drink one, I just throw it back up a few minutes later.’
Well, it turns out he hadn’t been able to eat actual food in months, was subsisting on pretty much just liquid, and hadn’t gone number 2 in over two weeks.
That didn’t bother him a bit – until he couldn’t drink. Then it was an emergency!
He had a big ol’ tumor blocking the distal part of his left colon (so near the end of the road, intestinally speaking), and everything gradually got backed up all the way to his stomach. That’s why he couldn’t keep a drink down – there was just no more room at the inn.
I fixed him with a colostomy, and he got better and left. He refused chemo, and I figured he’d just go home and die of cancer. However, almost exactly one year later, he came back to me with just about the same complaint – obstructed to the point of not being able to drink.
Except for this time, it was that his ostomy had essentially retracted into his abdomen and the skin had nearly grown shut over it.
He was pooping out of a teeny-tiny hole in his skin. WHAT?
Even my oldest partners had never seen anything like it, but once again Cooter wasn’t remotely fazed. He just wanted us to fix it so he could go home and keep drinking.
I did. Haven’t seen Cooter since. I kind of hope he’s still out there, treating his cancer with suds and just blissfully ignoring the Grim Reaper.”
6. Might want to double check those instructions…
“There was a patient who was upset to find out that she was pregnant again because she’d used her diaphragm EXACTLY as she’d been told. She carefully inspected it for holes, applied the spermicide, placed it, wore it at night, then took it out, cleaned it and put it away each morning… and then her husband arrived home from his night-shift.”
7. Some explaining to do
“We responded in the ambulance to a place that is… well, it’s different. We go hot for a 13-year-old girl with abdominal pain.
We get there, and she’s lying on the couch, surrounded by family. She’s uncomfortable but able to laugh and joke that her stomach hurts.
It feels ‘crampy’ for the last two days and she has had blood trickling out from her privates.
This happened last month too, then about a month before that. She has had to go home from school each time.
She is surrounded by women. Her mother (late-20s), her grandmother (40s), great-grandmother (early 60s) and great-great-grandmother (mid-70s). Every one of them is flabbergasted as to what this could be.
So, here I am, a 30-year-old dude of a very different ethnic and cultural background, asking all sorts of uncomfortable questions.
‘Have any of you explained to her about periods?’ No. Clearly not. No one here has been NOT pregnant for a long enough time to understand that they come more or less regularly, roughly once a month.
We took her in any way.
Better safe than sorry. At least us and the nurses could explain some things to her. Clearly, no one else could.”
8. Full contact
“I worked in the ER during my internship and met a girl who had increasingly painful and red eyes since a couple of days back. The last 24 hours had been horrible. I asked about all the normal stuff, and she claimed to have no idea why she had an eye problem – she had never had anything wrong with her eyes.
I proceeded to drop some dye in her eyes to check them under a microscope, and when I did, I realized she was wearing contacts.
She didn’t like her natural eye color, so she had bought a set of blue colored lenses eight months earlier.
Never removed them, not even during night time. She didn’t even think to mention this to me, claimed to have no ‘foreign materials’ in her eyes.
I gave her quite the harsh lecture and a referral to an ophthalmologist.”
9. Home Improvement
“I worked in a private WASP hospital in a very affluent community. This meant I missed out on injuries from gang violence but got to see some of the dumbest attempts at home improvements ever. I will list my favorite.
So, two guys are attempting to lay hardwood flooring.
They have no clue what they are doing, but what the heck. They rip up the old flooring, lay down some plywood and start to lay down their nice antique hardwood boards. At this point, they have an issue.
How does one find the studs in the floor when they are covered by the larger plywood panels?
Well, being geniuses, they decide to send one guy to the floor below and have him call out under the beam and have the guy fire his nail compressor over the sound.
There are so many issues at this stage that it is amazing. I have no clue why they thought this plan was a good idea. So tempting to start smacking them around at this point… but had to be professional and just let them keep going.
Sure enough, the guy on the top floor missed a beam, fires the way over-powered tool into plywood, it goes through the weaker first layer of flooring, shoots the guy on the bottom floor in the head.
They know the nail missed the beam (there is a hole to prove it) but can not locate the nail.
Oddly enough, the patient was fine. The nail grazed his skull and entered the skin, then settled behind his ear.
It was a very sore bump. He assumed the nail had hit him on the way by and initially, didn’t want to come in, but the friend insisted on it since they could not find the missing nail.
Great x rays, couldn’t keep them.”
10. Smelly
“I was an intern in the ER. I have seen a lot of stupid people; it was a small town and all. The worst I think was when I walked in, and the floor smelled like… I don’t even know. It was by far the worst thing I had ever smelled.
I asked a passing nurse what the smell was, and he just shrugged his shoulders and told me, someone, probably poop everywhere.
Well, the doctor is preparing to go into this room, but I did not expect what would happen next.
He opened the door, and I almost barfed. It was extremely hard to keep my professional composure.
The guy had his leg wrapped up. The doctor asked him to unwrap it, and it was gangrene. From his foot up to the middle of his thigh.
The smell I had been smelling was rotting flesh. The cause? ‘The four-wheeler I was riding caught fire six months ago.’”
11. Nothing a little Jack can’t fix
“As an Army medic, I have had some dumb patients. One of the first guys I treated got nasty road rash from a motorcycle crash and decided to treat it himself by pouring Jack Daniels on it. By the time he came to the medics, it was pretty bad, and I had to do debridement with a scrub brush: scrubbing the bad parts off with plastic bristles.
He was in a lot of pain, and I was trying not to laugh at him.
We once had a guy who had the tip of his finger amputated. His first question was, ‘will this grow back?’
One guy had a sore back, and while I was doing the physical exam, he said, ‘Doc, my spine is curved (it wasn’t).
That’s why my nose is crooked.’
Medics all have lots of fun stories.”
12. Baby only likes the good stuff
“I grew up in Upstate New York, where my dad had his practice (he’s an OB/GYN). Genesee Brewery was nearby, so it was a fairly popular adult beverage brand with the locals.
A patient came into the office for a prenatal checkup.
As part of his follow up, he asked if they were drinking anything they shouldn’t so that he could tell them to avoid it.
The woman reassured him that her drinking habit was fine. ‘Oh, don’t worry Doctah!
I drink da good stuff. I drink Genny Cream!’
My dad then had to explain that even if she’s drinking the ‘good stuff,’ she still can’t have it when pregnant. She honestly thought that if she had ‘good’ stuff, it’d be fine for the baby.
Yikes. Plus, I think Genesse Cream is pretty awful to begin with, which makes the story funnier.”
13. He drove himself
“I’m a surgical resident, and one that comes to mind while I was on the cardiothoracic service was a gentleman that came in through the trauma bay with a stab wound to the chest. He reported (after we fixed the rather large hole in his right ventricle) that he was just visiting a friend and while on the stoop of the building, a random stranger stabbed him with a sword from a 1st-floor window.
He proceeded to laugh, get back in his car with his buddies and drive home, despite the rather profuse bleeding from his chest. He drove home and then eventually decided he should go to the hospital. He drove BY HIMSELF to the hospital.
The last thing he remembered was being on the way to the hospital. Lucky jerk was found in the parking lot. He had passed out in his car. He eventually made it to the OR and walked away just fine.”
14. Too many to count
“There are several close calls. There was the patient who fixed an appointment for a pedicure the day after open heart surgery. He said that he’d just sneak out of the ICU and that nobody would notice.
Then there was the patient who had an amputation of half of his foot and decided that it would be a good idea to walk to the toilet after returning to his room, covering the floor in bloody footsteps because the suture ripped open again.
Then the patient who said that he didn’t have any previous operations, but was covered in scars. When asked about each of them, he suddenly remembered having about 15 surgeries for various accidents.
The patient who forgot that he had his kidney, spleen, and part of the colon removed (because of a tumor).
There was one patient who decided that he’d never take more than three pills a day (because obviously taking more than three pills a day is going to kill you). He was on four or five different meds at that time, and just chose at random which meds he was going to take which day.”
15. Better safe than sorry
“I still remember a guy coming to the hospital with his girlfriend and asking for the morning after pill. I asked them when did the intercourse happen and he says, ‘Well, I wouldn’t call it exactly intercourse, but my girlfriend would feel much more relaxed if she took the pill.’
I asked, ‘Could you define the nature of your contact?’
He says, ‘Well… uh… my girlfriend is pure, so we don’t ‘do it,’ but last night we were in our underwear, and we were cuddling, and I came a bit in my underwear, and then we kept cuddling, and my wet underwear was touching her thigh.
So maybe something found its way into her?”
16. How else?
“I had a marine once who came to me complaining of a rash to his right forearm for two weeks. This was his first visit for the issue and hadn’t had anything like this before. He was worried since he reported worsening symptoms since initial onset.
When asking about prior skin issues, he told me he had ringworm just before THIS rash.
I look at his arm, it looked like a mild second-degree chemical burn in a rather circular shape, with blisters on the edges. What got me was the exact definition in the burn edge. Asking the young LCPL how he got that he replied, ‘Well that’s the burn I got from the bleach I poured on my arm.’
When I ask him WHY he poured bleach on his arm he says, ‘Well, how else was I going to kill the ringworm?’”
17. Don’t miss it
“I have the grandma, the mom, and the teen in the room. The teen is pregnant, but this apparently is a good thing. There are no fathers/grandfathers/boyfriends/jobs in the picture, but everyone decided it was about time a new generation was added to the family lineage.
Apparently, the teen did not appreciate the fatigue, full bladder, back pain, etc., that go along with being pregnant and is also experiencing some cramping pains. She demands that we do a C-section because she’s tired of being pregnant (even though she’s still not far enough along) because then we can just hook up the premie in an incubator to finish growing and the government can just pay for the (incredibly expensive) ICU stay.
My jaw just dropped.
Then there was the lady wearing short shorts and no underwear who raised her leg and showed me the puss-filled wound on her labia … while in the middle of the waiting room.
I don’t miss rural OB/Gyn experiences.”
18. Cement cast
“Turns out using cement as a DIY cast for your broken (but not reset) leg is a bad idea. Turns out the chemicals in the cement irritate and dissolve your skin. A patient became septic and almost died by the time he presented for medical care.
Emergency Medicine – preventing natural selection one stupid person at a time.”
19. The thirst and the energy
“As a med student, myself and another student took a history from a guy who drank several (10+) cups of tea a day with six sugars in each one ‘for my thirst’ and had six meals a day of four bacon sandwiches, with butter, ‘for the energy.’
That’s all he had every day.
That’s it. He couldn’t understand why his heart disease wasn’t getting better, why he’d put on weight, why he was now showing high blood sugar and was borderline diabetic.”
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