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. :/

Rocketpoweredgorilla, (edited )
@Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca avatar

A bit hard to explain, but I had an accident once that screwed up my wrist. If you look at your wrist, there’s a bone that sticks out forming a little lump. underneath it is another round bone called the perilunate. My perilunate got dislodged and ended up pinching off the nerves to my fingers (carpal tunnel) and essentially shut down three of my fingers. My wrist was x-rayed and two separate doctors who looked at the x-ray told me everything was fine.

I asked “Are you sure?” I’m no stranger to pain but something felt totally off there. I was assured everything was ok, and to go to my doctor in a month if things didn’t get better. A month later, I went to another doc because it was not better at all, who took another x-ray and sent me home. I had just gotten home when he phoned me in a panic and told me to head straight back to the hospital for an expert to look at. He was in total disbelief that both doctors didn’t notice. I had surgery and three steel pins put into my wrist the next morning to hold things in place. Here’s the x-ray with a rather noticable bone out of place. i.imgur.com/n2rHYuw.jpg and after the pins were put in to hold things in place while it healed. i.imgur.com/Cnh0QwK.jpg

TLDR: I ran around for a month with a bone on the wrong side of my wrist because two doctors were in a hurry.

Lamb,

I’m so sorry you went through that. Fuck these doctors. :(

Rocketpoweredgorilla,
@Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca avatar

Although I was a bit annoyed at them I can’t really blame them. People screw up sometimes, it just sucked it had to be on me lol! I will never have full range use of my right hand anymore but I’m not sure how much was due to them overlooking things vs how much is because of the accident itself.

intensely_human,

They didn’t just “screw up” they were negligent

intensely_human,

Why in god’s name do they think they can diagnose nerve issues with x-rays??

It makes no sense.

To be clear I am not disbelieving you. I have plenty of experience with doctors trying to use x-rays to diagnose soft tissue problems. It’s so fucking stupid it makes me want to rip my hair out.

LemmyKnowsBest, (edited )

That time in the year 2000 I had gotten extremely ill and I had never felt such peculiar horrific illness in my life, it was like a flu but worse and weirder and I felt like I was going to die because I couldn’t eat I couldn’t stand up, (I’m normally an extremely healthy active person), this went on for a couple weeks and I lived alone which made it impossible to see a doctor because I couldn’t drive myself in that condition,

but thankfully I had a spiritually intuitive friend who had a feeling she should call me and thankfully she did and she arranged for one of her friends to drive me to the hospital.

So I saw my primary care physician and he was very dismissive of me. When he came into the room he saw me laying on the crackly paper bed and he insultingly thought I was faking sick and trying to get out of work, and told me to sit up. He mockingly said “oh you’re not feeeeling well?” He troubled himself to run a throat culture on me then sent me home. I was not feeling well enough to go back home and die alone.

The next day my same friend arranged to come pick me up and take me to the emergency room where they admitted me into the hospital.

I was hospitalized for 2 weeks apparently I had cytomegalovirus, and they ran all kinds of tests on me including general anesthesia for throat probe down to my intestines, an eye exam for some reason, but mostly those two weeks were a complete blur to me, I mostly slept all the time.

The husband and son of my friend came to pick me up from the hospital when it was all over, and I was recuperating at home for another week before returning to work, when I got a phone call from my original primary care physician and he said “You know what, your throat culture came back looking a little unusual.”

I’m like

“No shit! I was just hospitalized nearly dead for 2 weeks. Now you’re calling me a month later telling me my throat culture was slightly abnormal? If I’d waited here all that time for your phone call, I wouldn’t have answered the phone because I would’ve been dead. Thanks for nothing.”

I didn’t actually say all those things to them, we don’t think of how to respond to such things until years later.

Lamb,

I’m so sorry. Bless the person who saved your life. And bless doctors and nurses who treat patients well. A faking patient will show up on tests. A denied non-true patient may die or suffer life-long consequences. There is 0 reason to deny people medical care.

stolid_agnostic,

If it helps, the doctor had actually reviewed your entire chart before calling you. He already knew he was an idiot, but whether he had the emotional maturity to understand it is a different question.

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.

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

Appoxo,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Your story is quite something. Can’t beat that.

For mine:
I suspect my orthodontist messed up my jaw as my bite is now skewed to one side (left is deeper than right).
Reason for why: I got removable braces (was/am afraid of glued braces in regards to feeling and social stigma) and they had a bridge in the back. Since the resting position of the tongue is around where the the metal wire bridge was it cut into the sides and I probably compensated by lowering my tongue position.
If I swallow the accumulated saliva I’d push the tip of my tongue against my front teeth and by that pushing apart the gap between my jaw rows.
The orthodontist obviously denied it but I am still thinking about that. and it would all add up…

intensely_human,

Please consider going to a rolfer with this jaw situation.

These kinds of “I did X action for a long time then my body reconfigured its shape” scenarios happen and the mechanism is myofascial tension.

A rolfer is trained on how to achieve that new alignment. It’s like myofascial release plus a layer of theory about how to sequence the release to ensure patterns don’t come back.

Usually runs about $150 a session.

OutlierBlue, (edited )

Rolfing is pseudoscience. Do not visit anyone who makes claims like this.

www.skepdic.com/rolfing.html

Appoxo,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Already did training with a speech therapie specialist for the tongue resting position. Nothing major beyond a cracking jaw if I open it too much /shrug.

ClarissaDarling,

A woman I know, younger than 30, received the “husband stitch” after giving birth. She does not trust medical professionals, and I don’t blame her.

Lamb,

It’s fucked up and people who do it should lose the ability to work with medical patients and other vulnerable people for life. :/

intensely_human,

The what?

stolid_agnostic,

An unnecessary suture placed in to make the vaginal opening tighter, ostensibly because this will feel good for their partner. It is an extra medical procedure that serves no purpose and can actually cause problems and pain for the woman later.

Sometimes birth causes tearing and doctors are ready to do some quick suturing right after. In this case, the person is saying that a doctor just went ahead and did this thing under the guise of cleaning things up but without asking about it first. This is medical assault.

intensely_human,

That’s fucked up

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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