15 Doctors Admit the Biggest Mistakes They’ve Ever Made in Their Careers

Doctors are only human. That means, among other things, that they are fallible, and they will make mistakes. Most of us try not to think about that fact too hard when they’re in charge of our lives, choosing instead to believe that the statistics are in our favor.

Which they totally are, usually!

And if you want to continue feeling good about that fact, you might want to avoid these 15 confessions.

15. Sort of a happy ending.

Pathologist here. Biggest mistake I ever made was cutting myself during an autopsy on an HIV patient. Lucky for me, I did not acquire the virus, so everything had a happy ending. (For me, anyway. That guy was still dead.)

Edit: Thanks to whoever gave me gold for fucking up at my job.

Edit 2: I am going to personally fillet the next person who says “relevant username”.

14. This is just heartbreaking.

My brother is a surgeon, and during part of his residency, he had to work in the pediatric unit. He was working with two newborns. One was getting much better and fighting for life. He was going to make it just fine. The other baby was hours from death. He wasn’t going to make it. My brother was in charge of informing the families. My brother realized about 15 minutes later that he had mixed up the families. He told the family with the healthy baby that their baby wasn’t going to make it, and he told the family with the dying baby that their baby was going to be just fine. He then had to go back out to the families and explain the situation to them. How devastating. To be given a glimmer or hope and have it ripped away from you not even an hour later. That was most upset I’ve heard my brother. He felt destroyed.

13. She almost killed someone.

In health care, we make mistakes. At every level from the top to the bottom, mistakes get made, and you just try to keep them as infrequent and minimal as possible.

When I was a student rotating through OB/Gyn, and I wrote an order for a woman’s post-partum continuation of magnesium sulfate, as she was pre-eclamptic ante-partum. I was super careful, because I knew what could happen with magnesium toxicity, and double-checked the order with the resident afterwards.

The nurse, instead of hanging one bag of mag-sulfate and another of I forget what, hung two bags of mag-sulfate, one of which she slammed into the patient over a minute, instead of slow-infusing over 12 hours.

The woman told the nurse she didn’t feel right, and the nurse poo-pooed it. I happened to be walking by, and stopped in to see what was up. There they were, two bags hanging, both marked in a bright red warning label. We called for the fast response team.

They, and my team, got there in time and took over, but she still went into respiratory depression and ended up in the ICU.

We all make mistakes, some of which are dangerous. I’ve absolutely made my fair share. I’ve missed diagnoses, or tried to save patients from a trip to the ER and they’ve ended up in the ER anyway, just later. As long as you recognize your mistake and make an effort to improve afterwards, and it wasn’t too neglectful / egregious, I understand.

But I reamed the nurse when I overheard her laughing about the incident like she hadn’t just almost killed someone. I don’t know what she thought, getting told off by a rotating student, but I was pissed at the time.

EDIT: ICU, not ER.

12. Get some sleep, y’all.

My parents are nurses. They knew a doc who’d been on a 36 hour shift. Patient came in with a punctured lung (I think) and the doc had to collapse the lung to fix whatever was wrong with it.

Through tiredness he collapsed the wrong lung, and the patient died. Doc ended up killing himself after being fired.

Don’t burn yourself out.

11. You never forget them.

Doctor here. I assume we mean medical errors and not general life decisions. No comment on life decisions. For medical error, I will not use a throwaway because I strongly think we should feel free to disclose our mistakes in order to improve quality and learn from each other.

My first week of my intern year (year one outside of medical school, when you’re on call overnight and all that, AKA “Season One of Scrubs”), everyone “signs out” their team’s patients to the doctor on call overnight. So that doctor (intern, with an upper-level resident also present overnight to supervise) is covering many patients they hardly know, maybe 60 or more. The situation was that a patient with dementia, unable to really communicate with people and clearly ‘not there’ but conscious, arrived from a nursing home with I think some agitation as the original complaint.

Basic labs ordered in the ER show the kidney function is worse than usual, which could be due to many things, but what really MUST be distinguished is between ‘not enough blood pumped forward to the kidneys and rest of the body’ (e.g. heart is failing and it’s backing up into the lungs) VS ‘not enough liquid in the blood TO flow’ (e.g. due to vomiting a lot or something). This is critical to distinguish because for the first you give medicine to make them pee out the extra liquid, and in the second you give more fluid. Either treatment for the opposite problem is catastrophic. Fortunately it’s usually easy to distinguish ‘wet’ from ‘dry’, based on listening to heart and lungs, chest x-ray (is there ‘congestion’ evidence?), blood pressure and heart rate (tend to drop BP and raise heart rate upon going from laying down to standing positions if you’re too ‘dry’), looking at neck veins while sitting up at an angle (they bulge if too ‘wet’), and so on. This patient was unable to cooperate with exam, answer questions, and the X-ray was sort of borderline (unchanged from the last x-ray maybe several weeks ago). My resident instructed me to sign out the patient with instructions to continue a 500mL saline inflow, then re-assess to see whether the patient looked more ‘wet’ or less ‘dry’. I signed this out, and forgot to make the order to stop the saline after 500mL, so it ended up running slowly in all night. The intern on call (also first week as doctor) forgot to re-assess at all or shut off the saline if it had been noticed because so busy with new admissions. We’d also ordered 3 sets of ‘heart enzymes’ meant to diagnose a heart attack, one reason for a patient suddenly getting ‘wet’ (i.e. heart pump failure), since the EKG was not interpretable (had a pacemaker which makes it impossible to tell). Lab fucked up too, because hospital policy was that if the first set of ‘heart enzymes’ was negative, apparently the 2nd and 3rd sets, each traditionally spaced 6-8hrs later to catch a heart attack if it starts to evolve and become detectable by blood test, were both cancelled.

I came in and first thing in the morning checked on this patient, who was screaming things nobody could understand and the nurses had chalked up to dementia and agitation. I checked the labs and saw the second and third heart enzymes hadn’t been done. I went to the bedside and saw the IV fluids still running. I immediately ran to the overnight intern, who said things had been so busy and nobody had called to notify that things were wrong. We stopped the fluids, immediately got a heart enzyme test, learned this patient was by now having a massive heart attack made much worse by the addition of IV fluids all night to this frail failing pump. I can’t get the screams out of my head, and cried a lot and was pretty depressed for a few weeks at least after this. The patient died because the status ended up being decided as not to resuscitate based on what the nursing home had on file, although no family members were known at all. This patient was totally alone, and spent the last night of their life in physician-induced agony. But I acknowledge the failure of two interns, the nurses, and the lab. Ultimately the blame fell on the lab and I think someone was fired, but I made clear to everyone that I felt to blame and wanted quality improvements made to prevent future errors, or at least catch them early if they happen. That’s I think the best you can do when you make a mistake.

There’s a Scrubs episode where as I recall at the end there’s a brief scene where the ghosts of dead patients representing medical errors follow around the physicians like little trains. It’s very poignant, but I can’t find the clip. That’s what it’s like though.

10. Terribly sorry, but I’m a member of the family now.

Not a big mistake but definitely awkward at the time. I was gluing up a lac on a 14yo girls forehead. Anyone who has used dermabond before knows that stuff can be runny and bonds very quickly. I glued my glove to her face. Her mum was in the room, and I had to turn to her and say “Im sorry, I’ve just glued my glove to her face”

9. That’s a doozy.

I’m a nurse, but I was working in the ER when a guy came in for a scratch on his neck and “feeling drowsy”. We start the usual workups and this dude’s blood pressure TANKED. We scrambled, but he was dead within 10 minutes of walking through the door. Turns out the “scratch” was an exit wound of a .22 caliber rifle round. The guy didn’t even know he’d been shot. When the coroner’s report came back, we found that he’d been shot in the leg and the bullet tracked through his torso shredding everything in between. There was really nothing we could’ve done, but that was a serious “what the fuck just happened” moment.

8. She doesn’t blame you, but…

As a very young doctor in training I misdiagnosed a woman with epilepsy. Some years prior she had sustained a gunshot wound to the frontal area, damaging the underside of one of her frontal lobes and severing an optic nerve to one of her eyes, as well as some of the muscles that rotated that eyeball. Surgery saved her life but the frontal lobe was scarred and the eye was blinded and always pointed down and at an angle away from her nose.

A few years after that she began having spells of a bizarre sensation, altered awareness, a pounding in the chest, and she had to sit down, stop what she was doing, and couldn’t speak. These were odd spells and I assumed she had developed frontal lobe epilepsy from the scar on her brain. Increasing doses of anti-seizure drugs seemed to work initially, but then the spells came back.

A couple years after my diagnosis her endocrinologist, who treated her for diabetes mellitus, checked a thyroid. It was super-high. The spells were manifestations of hyperthyroidism. She drank the radioactive iodine cocktail which ablated her thyroid, got on thyroid replacement therapy, and felt well thereafter. No permanent harm done and she was able to come off the anti epilepsy drugs.

She was obese – not the typical skinny hyperthyroid patient – and if she developed thyroid eye disease, I couldn’t tell because her one eye was already so messed up. I see how I screwed it up. but in retrospect I have never been sure what I could have done differently, except test her thyroid at the outset of treatment. Hence, a lot of patients – thousands – have had their thyroid checked by me since then. Every so often I pick up an abnormality and it gets treated.

The lady was an employee of the hospital where I trained and I ran into her one day;she gave me a hug and let me know how this had all gone down. She made a point of wanting me to know she didn’t blame me “because I always seemed to care about her and what happened to her.”

I think about her, and how I screwed up her diagnosis and set back her care, almost every day. I am a much better diagnostician now but I always remember this case and it reminds me not to get cocky or be too sure that my working diagnosis is correct.

7. Talk about high stress.

PharmD here. Couple different quick stories.

Heard of a pharmacist who filled a fentanyl patch incorrectly and the dose was so high that the patient went into severe respiratory depression and died. They’re still practicing.

Worked with another pharmacist back in the mid 2000’s when I was still a tech who filled a script for Prozac solution (concentrated it is 20mg per mL. Average adult dose is 20 mg.) instead of 1 mL once daily he filled it for one teaspoonful (5 mL). The child got serotonin syndrome and almost died. He is no longer working to my knowledge.

6. Take a closer look.

Someone else tragically lost their life years ago but the incident saved my sister’s life about 10 years later.

Several years ago, my sister and I were in a car accident. I had visible injuries, she did not and was walking around without any problems, so we thought. Nine days later, she was preparing dinner, began to feel ill, vomited and then passed out. She was taken by ambulance to the hospital emergency and after talking to my brother-in-law for only a couple of minutes, he rushed my sister into surgery and removed her spleen immediately, it had ruptured in the accident but was a slow bleed.

My sister was in ICU for a couple of weeks but survived and is in good health today. Later, the admitting trauma surgeon said he recognized what was happening because of a mistake his college professor told the class she made as a surgeon years earlier.

A teenage boy had fallen from a cliff and hit rocks below, other than being bruised he was fine so did not seek medical help. Seven days later he was brought unconscious into ER, where the college professor was working as a surgeon at the time. She and her team were not able to quickly identify his symptoms of a ruptured spleen that had happened 7 days ago. The teenage boy died about an hour later.

She was always sure to share this particular incident with her students, thus saving my sister’s life when one of her former students (my sister’s doctor) showed up to class that day!

5. I mean at least he lived.

I missed a gunshot wound once. A guy was dumped off at the ER covered in blood after a rap concert. We were all focused on a gunshot wound with an arterial bleed that was distracting. The nurse placed the blood pressure cuff over the gun shot wound on the arm. We all missed it because the blood pressure cuff slowed the bleeding.

I was doing the secondary assessment when we rolled the patient, and I still missed it.

We didn’t find it till the chest x-ray. The bullet came of rest in the posterior portion of the thoracic wall without significant trauma to major organs.

The patient lived. But I still feel like I fucked up big time.

4. Sometimes messing up plays in someone’s favor.

This thread is pretty depressing, so i’ll lighten it up a bit. A few months ago, I accidentally ran a creatinine test on a patient when a comp metabolic wasn’t ordered. It turns out that the guy was in renal failure, and no one knew. He was about to go in for surgery ( I believe it was a bypass, but could be wrong), but I got the results in in time to stop them from putting him under. Shit could have been messy. I’m glad I screwed up, and I’m sure he has no idea that he could have died.

3. It just slipped out.

Not me, but my mom. She just retired as an ob/gyn and she told me about a time early on in her career when, while not a real medical mistake, she still almost ruined the operation. She was performing a c-section I think, and she dropped her scalpel on the floor. Before she could think, she blurted out “oh shit” as a reaction. The mother, thinking something was wrong with the baby, started panicking. It took a team of nurses, the husband, and the mother of the patient to calm her down.

Edit: This was very early in her career, and she practiced for another 25 years without major incident.

2. As simple as that.

My grandmother has had diabetes for about 20 years, and takes a handful of meds to help control it. About 10 years ago, she developed a persistent cough. It wasn’t bad, she said it felt like a constant tickle in the back of her throat.

She went to her doctor to find out what was going on, and he ordered a battery of tests concerned that she was developing pneumonia, lung cancer, etc. All the tests came back negative, so he prescribed a cocktail of pills to help combat it. Over the span of 5 years, she had tried about 35 different meds and none helped.

One day when she went it for a routine check-up, her normal doc was out and she saw one of the on-call residents. He looked at the barrage of pills she was on and asked why. When she explained, he replied, “Oh, the cough is a side effect of this one particular drug you’re on to regulate your insulin. If we change you to this other one, it will go away.”

1. Something you never want to see.

As an ICU nurse, I’ve seen the decisions of some Doctors result in death. Families often times don’t know, but it happens more than you’d think. It usually happens on very sick patients that ultimately would have died within 6 months or so anyway, though.

Procedural wise, I have seen a physician kill a patient by puncturing their heart while placing a pleural chest tube. It was basically a freak thing as apparently the patient had recently had cardiothoracic surgery and the heart adhered within the cavity at an odd position. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he came to the realization of what had happened. You rarely see people accidentally kill someone in such a direct way. Heartbreaking.

This isn’t making my distrust of doctors any better?

Are you a doctor? Has a doctor made a mistake with you? Tell us the story!

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Michael Jordan Opens a Clinic for Patients with Little or No Health Insurance in North Carolina

Some call Michael Jordan the greatest basketball player of all time, and while he still remains in the game as owner of the Charlotte Hornets, he has also shifted his focus to helping out the needy in North Carolina.

Jordan recently opened the first of two clinics that he funded in Charlotte. The Novant Health Michael Jordan Family Medical Clinic will serve the Charlotte community and will help uninsured and underinsured residents.

Jordan became emotional at the opening of the facility, saying, “As you can see, it’s a very emotional thing for me to be able to give back to a community that’s supported me over the years.”

‪“It’s not about the money. It’s not even about the name.” Michael Jordan at the opening of the @novanthealth Michael…

Posted by The Charlotte Post on Thursday, October 17, 2019

In 2017, Jordan committed to donating $7 million to open two clinics in Charlotte to provide healthcare to communities and people with little or no healthcare – and he followed through. The clinic will not only provide typical healthcare, but will assist patients with behavioral health and social services as well.

Carl Armato, President and CEO of Novant Health, said, “This clinic will not only provide access to medical care for those who need it most, but it will connect them to resources to ensure their health extends beyond the doctor’s office.”

Novant Health Michael Jordan Family Medical Clinic

#MichaelJordan stopped by our new Novant Health Michael Jordan Family Medical Clinic to get his #FluShot. ? We recommend everyone get their flu shot – and early! For more information about the clinic he made possible and its services, visit NHMichaelJordanClinic.org. #FluShotFriday

Posted by Novant Health Hemby Children's Hospital on Wednesday, October 23, 2019

The site of the first clinic was specifically chosen because the location is in a part of Charlotte that is shown to have a high need for medical care. Area residents were also given a voice in the planning; they were consulted at meetings and forums so that Novant could learn what residents were specifically looking for from a healthcare facility in their neighborhood.

Jordan added about opening the clinic, “I believe that your ZIP code or neighborhood should not determine the quality of your health care – or whether or not you can even get care at all.”

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After Almost Losing His Mother, This Teen Invented a Bra That Can Detect Breast Cancer Early

I bet we’ll be hearing from this young man for many years.

After Julián Ríos Cantú watched his mother endure two bouts with breast cancer, the 18-year-old from Mexico decided he wanted to help out other women who might not have access to affordable healthcare.

Posted by Julián Ríos Cantú on Monday, November 20, 2017

Cantú’s mother ended up having a mastectomy. Standard screenings missed the lumps in his mother’s breasts because her high breast density obscured the growths. Cantú said, “At that moment, I realized that if that was the case for a woman with private insurance and a prevention mindset, then for most women in developing countries, like Mexico where we’re from, the outcome could’ve not been a mastectomy but death.”

Cantú took matters into his own hands, inventing Eva, a “bio-sensing bra insert” that uses thermal sensing and artificial intelligence to create a thermal map of women’s breasts. Abnormal temperatures and tumor growth are related, and an Eva insert can help women detect cancerous growths. It also helps with the self-examination process.

As things stand today, patients don’t have a lot of options for early detection of breast cancer. If you’re under 45, you can’t receive mammograms due to concerns about exposure to radiation. Even if you’re over that age, mammograms can be very expensive.

The Eva technology does not emit any radiation, and women of all ages can wear the insert.

The company has performed clinical trials on more than 2,000 women in Mexico. Eva’s website says,

“Eva’s technology is approved by the FDA as an adjunct method for breast cancer detection in section 884.2980 Teletermographic Systems. Similarly, Eva Clinic operates under the highest ethical standards, strictly following the Official Mexican Standard NOM-041-SSA2-2011, for the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, control, and surveillance of breast cancer.”

The product is now available for use at certified Eva clinics, but who knows? Maybe someday it’ll be in our houses, helping women detect breast cancer even earlier.

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Americans Share the Most Absurd Medical Bill They Ever Received

Healthcare is on many people’s mind these days, and the 2020 election is full of ideas on how to take our broken system and hopefully improve it.

Senator Bernie Sanders is and has been passionate about the topic for much of his career, and is championing a controversial Medicare for All plan that would see the end of private insurance offerings for good.

Regardless of what you think about Medicare for All, I’m sure we can all agree that healthcare costs are too damn high, and something has to be done.

Recently on Twitter, he asked his followers to share the most absurd medical bill they ever got in the mail, and you guys.

They delivered.

 

20. Always decline the ambulance ride.

19. Nobody should be worrying about the bill.

18. Yeah, that’s not a choice.

17. This one might win for most ridiculous.

16. I’m not sure that’s really science.

15. Heartbreaking AND absurd.

14. A whole new level of insult to injury.

13. We need equal opportunity healing.

12. I’ll bring my own Band-Aid.

11. Only the rich get to live.

10. I mean what else can you do?

9. It would be funny if it wasn’t so infuriating.

8. Answer: hardly anyone.

7. That’s a pretty penny for stuff you could have gotten at Walgreens.

6. You need a surgeon for that?

5. That’s a pretty high price for wielding a pair of tweezers for under 5 minutes.

4. Kidney stones are the worst and if $16k would help, I would have paid it.

3. I think they’re billing the wrong person.

2. Everyone should have a problem with this.

1. What on earth does most of that even mean?

 

I’m not here to discuss politics, but I think we can all agree that most of these are pretty darn silly.

If you were running for president, how would you solve the problem of rising healthcare costs, access to care, care for veterans, and all the rest?

There’s no easy answer, of course, but give it a go!

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Brave Women Are Sharing Their Abortion Stories with the Hashtag #YouKnowMe

Right now is a scary time to be a woman in America.

People who support a woman’s right to choose what she does with her reproductive health are trying anything they can to make sure the message is spread far and wide that even if people don’t think they know somebody who has had an abortion… they do.

A lot of people have shared their story, but Busy Philipps recently shared a story on her talk show about her experience…

Busy also shared some statistics… with the hashtag #YouKnowMe

Folks, 25% of all women have had an abortion at some point in their lives. If you didn’t know that stat before, now you do.

Naturally, people are taking up the hashtag and sharing their stories…

Yes, women will die.

Lots and lots of women.

And it doesn’t matter what their reason is..

Because these are incredibly difficult choices…

And without those choices, women literally lose their rights as human beings…

Because imagine a world where rapists just get to have children because they commit a crime…

And the only option being a hotel room in the middle of nowhere…

Women need to be able to plan their lives…

Without fear of consequence for ONE moment taking over their entire life…

Again, these are health care decisions, first and foremost…

And nobody should ever make that decision for another person.

Yes, we all know somebody who had an abortion. And their reasons, while their own, are completely justifiable.

Anybody who tells you differently is just trying to interfere with a woman’s civil rights.

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Chiropractic was founded by…

Chiropractic was founded by a traveling religious miracle healer who belived that magnets could cure diseases. He was sent to jail in Iowa in 1906 for practicing medicine without a license. The American Medical Association later labelled chiropractors an “unscientific cult.”

Listerine was invented in the…

Listerine was invented in the nineteenth century as powerful surgical antiseptic. It was later sold, in distilled form, as both a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea.

The U.K. is Seeing a Sudden Resurgence of Ancient Diseases

As we here in America battle with the comeback of diseases like measles, the United Kingdom is also struggling with the reemergence of old-school, Dickensian diseases gout and scarlet fever.

Data from the UK National Health Service shows a 52% increase in four key “Victorian diseases” since 2010/2011 – many of which were assumed to have disappeared along with chamber pots. The rise of sanitation, vaccinations, and modern science seemed to have these diseases on the run, but the recent data shows that they’re not going down without a fight.

Cases of scarlet fever have increased by 208% in the past decade, going from 429 cases in 2010/11 to 1321 cases in 2017/2018. The disease was the leading cause of death in children in the early 20th century and presents with a sore throat, fever, headache, swollen lymph nodes, and a pink-red rash.

Scarlet fever rash
Image Credit: Wikipedia

A vaccine nearly wiped out whooping cough in the 1950s but hospital admissions are up 59%, and the instances of people experiencing gout are up 38% – almost 2000 more cases in 2017/2018 than there were 10 years before. Gout is associated with a poor diet, heavy drinking, an a general lack of concern over one’s health.

Whooping cough bacteria
Image Credit: Wikipedia

Life expectancy is stalling in the UK, too, and hospital admissions due to malnutrition are up 54%. Infant mortality rates are also on the rise, and as with everything else, the poorer people are suffering the most.

The culprit? Well, the data suggests large cuts to healthcare, social services, and other public services could be to blame. That said, the study was commissioned by a political party that is against the austerity programs, which should be taken into consideration.

The data is solid and from independent sources, however, so the truth can’t be denied – people in the UK are sicker than ever, dying younger than they were ten years ago, and generally struggling to stay well as people in Western Europe face none of the same challenges (in general).

I don’t know about you, but I hope to avoid all of these diseases in the modern world. All I’ve got is a vaccination and a prayer.

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In 17th-century Poland…

In 17th-century Poland, wet bread mixed with spider webs was used to cure wounds. It may sound stupid, but it work, as the bread contained fungal spores, including penicillin and naturally produced antibiotic substances.

In 1901, a doctor was told mid-surger…

In 1901, a doctor was told mid-surgery that he was needed urgently elsewhere, to which he responded that he could not leave “even for the President of the United States”. He was then told he needed to operate on William McKinley, the President of the United States. The doctor maintained his claim and actually didn’t […]