Messed up things a doctor did to you or someone you know? / Bad experiences with doctors

Today I spoke to a coworker who had bad experiences with doctors and was seeking recommendations for a new one, then other coworkers chimed in, and so I decided to ask you guys as well. Well, not for a doctor recommendation, but about your bad experienced with doctors?

I’m gonna spoiler mine, because it makes me very uncomfortable, so perhaps it may make someone else very uncomfortable.

uncomfortableI had a doctor who had no business in it make me show my intimate parts (I’m intersex) and she touched them. She was curious, I guess…? She’s a psychiatrist, so, again, literally 0 business doing so. I already have trauma from regular people who treat me like a circus display, I really had no need for someone with systemic power over me using it like that… No, I didn’t report this. I was a teenager and barely functioning at the time. :/

Wojwo,

Felt depressed, low energy, not putting on muscle despite biking. Family practice doc said let’s test your testosterone. Ok, it was low, very low. He checked my TSH and then prescribed testosterone replacement therapy. I was young and worried about having kids. He said that the T would not affect my sperm count. My wife said he needed to run a few more tests, but he dismissed her A few years later we’re looking at adoption, because surprise, the T made me infertile. We decided to pause the adoption process and my wife went to med school. During which she was vindicated and I went to a proper endocrinologist, who put me on HCG and now we have 3 kids.

sunbeam60,

Have always been treated fairly well by doctors, but since marrying and getting to know my wife so well that very, very little remains private, it’s very clear to me that doctors (male and female alike) take a special interest in diminishing female problems relating to periods, menopause, child birth, breast feeding, hormones etc.

arabiclearner,

Failing to diagnose properly, if at all

Acting like they are superior in every way

Getting upset if you research stuff yourself beforehand

Telling you that it’s either “stress-related” or “age-related”

Etc. Etc.

calypsopub,

I’ve been lucky with having good doctors, but my best friend OTOH … I took her to an ER because she had severe back pain for no reason. She’s diabetic, and I noticed one of her toes looked black. I pointed this out to the doctor, who dismissed it. She said my friend just needed some pain killers for strained muscles. As we were sitting in a drivethru waiting to pick up the prescription, my friend was getting worse, so I took her to a different ER. They said she was just constipated and gave her some laxatives. Two days later she is screaming in pain, can barely move, and is shitting herself from the laxatives. We take her to a third hospital ER and insist she be admitted. She lay in a hospital bed for days with no diagnosis. Finally when she fell and they realized her legs were paralyzed, they did an MRI and found she was nearly dead of sepsis and had three abscesses along her spine.

They put her on strong IV antibiotics and did surgery to clean the abscesses – telling her she only had a 20% chance of surviving the surgery and would probably never walk again. Four months later, after learning to walk again, she finally went home. She still has chronic back pain and adhesions from the surgery.

All from an infected toe that doctors couldn’t be bothered to check out.

stolid_agnostic,

Anyone with a condition like HIV or cancer will tell you that every ailment you ever report is totes obvs related to that condition and not, you know, a freestanding one that needs its own treatment.

Nefara,

I had a baby last year, and while I was lucky to have an uncomplicated and smooth birth, my experience with lactation was hellish. I had no frame of reference to be able to anticipate how painful breast feeding could be, and my discomfort and suffering were constantly dismissed and downplayed by every nurse I encountered. They basically played it off as “oh you’re just not used to it” and told me my baby’s latch was fine so I must be fine. One nurse even squeezed my (extremely sore and sensitive) breast while attempting to show me how to feed my baby. I tried telling them the breast pump machines hurt me even on the lowest setting and they just waved me off with a “well it’s gotta be done” attitude. When my milk finally did come in it was literally the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. I woke my husband up with a wailing howl of anguish that made him think the baby had died. When I called the women’s health line, trying to explain what I was going through in between gasps and choking back tears they said they couldn’t help me but they’d have someone call me back. No one did. I ended up spending the night hyperventilating and in tears trying to massage myself while my husband tried to soothe me.

In every other respect my baby and I got exemplary care. I just got the impression that my experience with having so much pain must be rare, and because of that they figured it couldn’t happen or I was just making shit up. I certainly had no idea it could hurt, it wasn’t even on my radar of things to be worried about, but turned out to be the worst part of having a baby. I did make an effort to make myself heard, and made some complaints at follow up appointments, but who knows if they took it seriously.

Lamb,

Even if your suffering is rare and they didn’t know how to help you, the least they could do was acknowledging your pain and offering mental comfort instead of dismissing it. Thank you for speaking up about it. Hopefully this can stay at the back of people’s heads so if they encounter someone with your problem, they may seek solutions or at least comfort the person.

Nefara,

Thanks. It really felt like every time I tried to speak up about it the response was as if they weren’t hearing me at all. No one seemed concerned or even really acknowledged what I was saying. It would have gone a long way for someone to say “wow that sucks” and at least make some show of trying to find something to do about it, even if it did end up as something I had to just “tough it out” with. They were so good about other aspects of the experience that it really threw me that no one took it seriously.

neshura, (edited )
@neshura@bookwormstory.social avatar

Nothing serious but when I was a kid my doctor regularly forgot to mark my blood samples with my age, resulting in me having to take Vitamin supplements on and off because the values flip-flopped between “way too low (for an adult)” and “way too high (for a 10 year old kid)”

Luckily my parents wizened up to that after a year and we switched doctors, was not a nice experience but still on the more harmless side of things

Edit: I do have a really messed up one. Back when I was a little toddler crawling on all fours my parents gave me milk in glass bottles, which is a good idea because plastics are obviously bad until you consider toddler behaviour. Well things inevitably happened and toddler me dropped the bottle while sitting on a bench. Toddler me then had nothing better to do than to follow the bottles course and fall into the glass pile. Parents rushed me to a child surgeon, he removed “all” glass pieces from my elbow. A few days after the OP the wound starts watering badly, so my parents go back to the doc. Nope he says, all the glass is removed. Wound doesn’t get better so my parents go to a normal surgeon. Dude looks at the wound, cancels his plans and essentially emergency operates the wound because lo and behold there were still glass fragments in my elbow. Scars being what scars are I now have a ~10 cm and a ~5cm scar stretching across my left elbow. Guess the only good part about it is that I was too young to remember that shitshow.

usernamesaredifficul,

I kept coming in with early signs of a treatable but very serious condition and they were waved away until it got very bad.

I’m fine now but easily could have died from it

Lamb,

I don’t get why it’s so common. Early treatment is always easier andand yields better results, not to mention patient’s suffering is much, much less.

usernamesaredifficul,

I do many early symptoms look benign on their own and doctors are often overworked because the stupid government wants to destroy universal healthcare to give the whole thing over to some Norman

bigboopballs,

what was the signs / condition?

usernamesaredifficul,

don’t want to say because of privacy. It was a form of cancer

Ladas552,

I was sick and my throat hurt, so my mom and I went to see a doctor, my usual pediatrician was off for some reason and we went to different doc, he was young by the look. I opened my mouth so he could see what’s wrong, he covered his nose and shut my mouth this instant and told it was a virus infection, it was clear that he didn’t even think before answering, so mother just treated my throat like it was Angina and pain got away. Seen this doc 2 times after and he just gave general advices like eat vitamins and stuff.

Why even become a doctor if you not gonna treat your patients, specially children?

pineapplelover,

Well my doctor uses yahoo mail and tried to make me send PII and pictures of my medical stuff to that email. I sent it password protected using protonmail so it doesn’t get stored in yahoo’s servers. Nothing too insane but that’s pretty much because other than that, my experiences with doctors have been alright.

blackstampede,

Went to a doctor for a twisted ankle, who told me that my feet had exaggerated arches. When asked what that meant (as in- medically, what problems could that cause) he laughed and replied that it meant I had “ugly fucking feet”.

GrayBackgroundMusic,

I was having some unusual medical issues and went to a doctor recommended by a friend. They seemed OK. I researched their treatment and it seemed OK. After a while I was having severe side effects and decided to find a more main stream doctor, a proper endocrinologist.

They were appalled at the dosage from the previous doctor. I had been started on 2x the maximum dose! Usually people start at 0.5x the dose and step up if it’s not enough.

That went fine for a bit, but I was having some discomfort administering the medicine and asked my GP. He lost his temper (not at me). The previous 2 doctors had gone straight to the simplest but most side effects solution. He explained that there are 5 different treatments for my condition! I was suffering thru unnecessary side effects because the previous doctors hadn’t even discussed these other solutions with me. I wasn’t aware of them at all.

So pissed.

neshura,
@neshura@bookwormstory.social avatar

Doctors can be so incredibly hit or miss and the worst part is there is no good way to check the reputation of a doc beforehand.

1993_toyota_camry,
@1993_toyota_camry@beehaw.org avatar

There are sites like ratemds.com, depending on your area.

But like most internet reviews, people tend to only post negative experiences or astroturfing.

michaelrose,

It’s deeply weird that it rates Staff Punctuality Helpfulness Knowledge and then averages them. Kinda funny that if Dr Ned had a nice nurse he would probably rate higher than House.

Fosheze,

When I first got officially diagnosed with depression the doc prescribed me an antidepressant and when I asked about sideffects he said “noone ever gets any sideffects from this med”. It literally had a black box warning and a CVS recipt of known sideeffects. Also yes there were definitely sideffects. Luckily the pharmacist wasn’t a moron like the doc and actually told me what to expect.

intensely_human,

My psychiatrists told me for well over a decade that they reason it takes antidepressants a couple weeks to start working is they need to build up in the blood.

Later research showed that antidepressants work through neurogenesis, same way as exercise. The thing that takes two weeks is the proliferation of new and differentiated cells eventually leading to new emotional states.

This whole “build up in the blood” thing never made any sense. If you ingest MDMA or alcohol it doesn’t need time to build up in the blood. The timeframe for an ingested chemical to reach peak volumes in the blood is about 30-60 minutes.

This story never made sense, yet it was accepted and parroted by doctors everywhere.

Fosheze,

This depends on the antidepressant. Most modern antidepressants have a relatively short half-life in the body. For example the one I’m on now has a half-life of about 10 hours. However one of the first SSRIs and the still most frequently prescribed one, Fluoxetine, has a half life of 4 days for the medication itself and its metabolite has a half-life of up to 10 days. So that one does literally take weeks to fully build up in the blood and that’s probably why doctors use that line.

Regardless, even with the shorter half-life drugs it does take a couple of weeks for your brain to adjust to the altered neurotransmitter levels. So even if it’s not technically “waiting for it to build up in the blood”, the result is the same and it’s an easily understandable explanation for doctors to use even if it’s not technically correct.

stolid_agnostic,

Doctors will absolutely gaslight your symptoms with anything that affects your brain. They don’t care that you can’t sleep or eat or have sex or experience emotions, it’s all about throwing pills at the problem until one seems to work a little bit and doesn’t make your life shit. I’ve never met a psychiatrist capable of basic human empathy.

Fosheze, (edited )

There are a lot of really shitty doctors out there that do shit like that but there are still decent ones too. Luckily the one in my initial post wasn’t my primary care doc. I couldn’t get in to see my normal doc at the time so I just got Dr. Dumbass instead.

My primary care doc is actually great with dealing with my depression despite it not being his area of expertise. I’d love to get in to see a psych and therapist but they’re all so booked up my doctor can’t even get me on a waiting list so he just does the best he can on his own. He literally called up that department while I was in the office with him and they basically gave him a flat no and then hung up on him. Durring one of my initial appointments he just straight up told me that mental health isn’t an area he knows much about but as time went on it became clear that he was putting in a ton of effort to actually educate himself. Now whenever I’m having an issue related to my depression or medications sideeffects he can quickly come up with multiple potential solutions discuss the pros and cons of each one with me and ask which one I want to try. Needless to say I will be keeping this doctor even if it means I need to lock him in my basement.

stolid_agnostic,

amazing!

DrQuint,

My senses are telling me to stay quiet on this one.

apotheotic,

I am curious, why?

DrQuint,

Joke about my name have the “Dr” title

apotheotic,

Ah, me dumb. Thanks

Myrhial,

My partner was admitted to the hospital when they couldn’t inflate his collapsed lung, as it had a hole in it. They put him on a machine that uses negative pressure to keep the lung shaped as it should be. Normally the hole should close but it wasn’t. Ended up with surgery but the problem remained. They were coming up with increasingly outlandish theories as to why it wasn’t healing, even going so far as to test him for tuberculosis, and listing him as false negative for covid. They also denied him adequate pain management, until one nurse noticed and gave him ibuprofen to go with paracetamol. This was all when the covid vaccine was only just out so I had to sit by helplessly while I’m increasingly realising the level of care he is receiving doesn’t match my expectations. But he’s never even been in a hospital and self advocacy is not something he’s learned.

Eventually they transfer him to a larger hospital. The doctor there doesn’t want to talk straight but between the lines you get the message that he feels the case was entirely mismanaged. They immediately lower the reverse pressure. Hold off on further surgery. Within days healing begins. A week later the lung is healed. It’s a miracle…

Anyway, we looked into legal options but there was a lack of proof. The original doctor followed procedure. Yet I’m 100% convinced that because my partner smokes, has bad teeth and looks like a metalhead, there was prejudice at play. I can’t know for sure but I feel like the original doctor blamed my partner and figured she’d have to scare him straight. That didn’t help of course, he resumed smoking and he’s unwilling to seek help because of this experience. I’m honestly shocked at how this could happen, but as time goes on I’ve seen in other situations how people immediately conclude a person is lower class and thus must be treated differently. If you do one thing for yourself, look into self advocacy. Especially when it comes to medical stuff. My own level of care started to go up when I began to have a conversation with health professionals, outlining my experience and asking many questions. But I’m a middle class woman with fairly conventional looks, so there is a whole level of prejudice I immediately don’t face.

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