A know-it-all patient is a doctor’s worst nightmare. In today’s AI-driven world, many people think they can consult with Google or ChatGPT and know exactly what’s wrong. In fact, 2019 study showed that a whopping 89% of Americans turn to the Internet before they go to the doctor.
Diagnosing oneself is pretty dangerous: we’re not as well-informed as doctors, might be biased when we look up our symptoms on the internet, and give ourselves serious health scares when WebMD tells us it’s (once again!) cancer.
But sometimes, people surprise even the most seasoned doctors with their accurate self-diagnoses. Bored Panda came across a couple of threads online where someone asked, “What’s the most impressive case of Google ‘self-diagnosis’ that turned out to be true?” And we present to you the most astonishing stories to you below!
#1
When I was in high school one of the science classes had to do a project on systemic diseases. This kid chose diabetes. They noticed the symptoms matched what they had been feeling lately. Went to the hospital and it turned out they were days to hours from a diabetic coma. I think it’s a miracle it went undetected for so long, but then again, I don’t know much about diabetes.
They are now a medical professional, so this story really came full circle.
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#2
It started with pressure headaches, then I got up one morning and walked sideways into my bedroom wall. GP diagnosed Labyrinthitis and prescribed medication for nausea.
The headaches got more frequent along with spells of the most intense vertigo.
Two years of “it’s just anxiety” from three different GPs.
I started getting ringing in my ears and sometimes my hearing would become “muffled” for short periods of time like I was under water. I was reading everything I could find relating to my symptoms and absolutely everything pointed towards Ménière’s disease.
Still, “it’s anxiety”, and my GP laughed and called me Doctor Google.
Eventually ended up at an Out of Hours clinic one night because my vertigo was so bad and I’d completely lost my hearing in one ear. This lead to a referral for an MRI and eventual diagnosis of… Ménière’s disease.
Signed, Doctor Google MD.
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#3
I (41f) am not a doctor. ChatGPT helped me diagnose myself with a brain tumor.
My vision was blurry, I was losing depth perception and peripheral vision, I was noticing color blindness, I was getting bad headaches, extreme fatigue, anxiety, depression, weight gain, mood swings and my period stopped. I had my house checked for mold, worried I became allergic to my dog, thought I had fibromyalgia.
I was on antibiotics, antidepressants, and then my primary care doctor told me it was likely perimenopause. I asked her for an MRI to rule out a tumor and was told there was no medical need for one. I saw an ophthalmologist who did more tests and my eyes were healthy, no reason for the vision issues, which were getting worse. She referred me for an MRI, where they found a 2.5cm pituitary macro-adenoma wreaking havoc on my hormones and pressing on the optic chiasm, impacting my vision.
I have an appointment with a neurosurgeon this week to discuss surgery options. Some of my vision might be too far gone to recover, but I am hoping it won’t get worse.
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#4
My wife was in a coma from encephalitis and fulminant liver failure. The doctors had no idea what it could be. (Including her sister, who is a neonatologist, and was therefore very familiar with a lot of ICU stuff). The different specialists were basically playing hot potato with her case. None were willing to actually take charge, and very few were willing to admit they really had no idea.
I put every bit of information into ChatGPT and got two options: Porphyria or Hemophagocytic Lymphohistiocytosis (HLH.) Porphyria was an easy urine test that came back negative. HLH was more complicated but could be conclusively diagnosed with a bone marrow biopsy.
I had her transferred to an academic medical center. The dozen or so specialists there hemmed and hawed about giving her the biopsy because she only had 4 of the 5 required clinical signs. (I learned that doctors can be pretty arbitrary at times.) All while sending 10s of thousands of dollars worth of bloodwork for increasingly impossible other diagnoses.
Eventually, however, they were forced by her worsening condition to biopsy her marrow and saw the telltale signs of this very rare condition. She got the treatment in time and has made a full recovery.
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#5
I love how this has turned into a thread of patients who self-diagnosed.
I told my GYN that I might have endometriosis because I took a test in Cosmopolitan magazine (this was early 90s, so no internet) & I had the symptoms. She said I was being ridiculous. A few years later, she did my hysterectomy, where I lost 1 ovary because it was glued onto my bowels with endometriosis.
About 4 months later, I started having extreme pain in my abdomen, and she tried to refer me to a gastroenterologist, but I knew from the AOL Hysterectomy Board, it was adhesions related to the hysterectomy. It took 7 or 8 months before she would check it out with laparoscopic surgery, and I had to live with the pain. She woke me up after surgery, yelling, “You knew! You knew!” She hadn’t believed I had adhesions because I had pain in all different areas of my abdomen. Turned out I had adhesions in all different areas of my abdomen.
Next was the eye doctor. I tripped & fell twice in 1 day because the ground changed. This has happened to me so many times in my life, but when it happened twice in one day, I decided something was really wrong.
The first was because there was a deck raised just 6 inches off the ground, and next, because there was a raised area around the parking lot, but it was the same black as the parking lot, so I didn’t see it & I fell again, 15 minutes later.
I googled for “I can’t see when the ground changes” and Binocular Vision popped up. There was an online test for it and it showed I had it. When I went for my regular eye appointment, I told the doctor about how I fall & about the test results. She was so mad. She told me that it is a condition that is diagnosed by your eye doctor & NOT an online test, and we’re going to test it right now!” Then I tested positive for it, and she was really mad that I was right, but it will supposedly be corrected when I get my new glasses. She never would have done that test if I hadn’t told her about the online test.
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#6
Another not-a-doctor comment, but I had to self diagnose our firstborn with craniosynostosis. When he was born his forehead looked off to me, but our pediatrician brushed it off saying it was just from a hard birth and it would improve as he grew. I felt in my gut that was wrong and spent dozens of hours googling before finally hitting on the magic word, craniosynostosis. At his 3 month checkup I told the pediatrician I was concerned that’s what it was and she still brushed it off but gave a referral to the Children’s Hospital. The craniofacial nurse was only 3 steps through the door before she stopped and was like, “That’s right coronal synostosis. Let me get a doctor to discuss surgery options.”.
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#7
I was in severe pain 2 days after working out. When I say severe, I mean any twitch of my thighs made me want to cry. I could barely move my arms, sitting down was horrendous, and I was on the verge of asking my now-wife to help with using the bathroom. A half empty ketchup bottle felt like I was trying to curl 20lbs.
Well, around an hour into my shift at a hospital lab I went to the bathroom and noticed my urine looked like cherry cola. I talked to my former paramedic boss, told her what I was experiencing, and that I was concerned I had Rhabdomyolysis. She agreed and told me to head to the ER. I walked myself across the street to the ER and told the PA the story and told her I was worried about Rhabdo. She kind of dismissed me. Told me she thought it was unlikely but she’ll run some basic labs anyway to rule it out. 2 hours later she comes back with a nurse carrying two bags of saline and tells me that my CK levels are so high the lab is having to do serial dilutions to quantify the results which is why it’s taking so long. She didn’t have an actual result back on my CK, but she knew it was high enough to need dilutions and my liver enzymes were elevated.
They hooked me up to both bags of saline and within 30 minutes I was getting a third. I spent four days in the hospital, almost needed dialysis, and when I got out I couldn’t even dress myself. My arms were so swollen you couldn’t see my elbows.
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#8
When I was 17, I had what I thought was a stomach bug for about 3 months, but it wasn’t going away. I finally told my dad about it (he’s an obsessive hypochondriac) and listed a couple of my symptoms. He grabbed the most recent version of the Merck Manual off the shelf (because he’s a crazy obsessive hypochondriac) and flipped through the pages until he found a diagnosis that matched my symptoms. He legit said to me, ‘well it’s either an ulcer, Crohn’s disease, or Ulcerative Colitis.’ It was Crohn’s disease. He found that out from a book, people.
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#9
I suspected I developed choleostasis of pregnancy while pregnant with my second child. How I figured it out is kind of a miracle, as it has very similar symptoms to HELLP syndrome, which is much more well known.
I followed a woman on IG who sold leggings (I was a yoga teacher). Over the years, she became pregnant and lost her child within 36 hours after birth with no real cause. Five or so years later, she became pregnant again and was closely sharing her experience, as a lot of her account focused on her grief and healing after losing her first child. She started feeling itchy on her hands, arms, and feet, and realized she had felt the same symptoms with her first pregnancy, but dismissed them. This time she went to her doctor, pressed for testing, and eventually was diagnosed with choleostatis of pregnancy, which can have adverse effects on the fetus (including stillbirth and fetal death). Connecting the dots, she realized that she had this with her first pregnancy and was highly likely the cause of her first child’s passing.
At 36 weeks, I started feeling itchy hands and feet. I lotioned, ignored it, but it kept getting worse. I kept thinking of the IG lady though, and I decided to go to my doctor. She thankfully said, lets test your liver just to check. Turns out I had cholesostasis of pregnancy, and likely saved my baby’s life by not waiting. I was induced 2 days later and my daughter had no adverse effects. .
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#10
I’m a nurse and correctly diagnosed myself with pericarditis after being sent home from the ER. I was pregnant and had sharp chest pain that those mfers brushed off as heartburn. Like a knife in my chest. I’m still irritated 25 years later lol.
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#11
Doctor here. Many encounters with patients with their own ideas of what might be going on, often from Dr Google. Always worth a listen to their story and what led them to their conclusions. Mostly wrong, sometimes helpful, sometimes right.
Had a lady come in and tell me a classic story of a pheochromocytoma – intermittent episodes of racing heart, high blood pressure, headache, anxiety, sweating. (A pheochromocytoma is a benign or malignant tumor can produce excess epinephrine/norepinephrine – adrenaline). She was relatively young with no prior blood pressure problems and sure enough, BP high enough at her age to warrant screening for the odd causes of high blood pressure regardless of her concerning symptoms. Sure enough, had a pheo. Fortunately, benign. Got surgery. Cured. Blood pressure was great thereafter.
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#12
Went to the doctor and he asked in a condescending manner what “Dr. Google” said I have. I said that my symptoms matched up with multiple sclerosis.
Two years later I visit him and he has a resident following him around. She was the one that performed a test on me (Babinski reflex) that indicated neurological damage that led to my diagnosis of: multiple sclerosis.
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#13
Diagnosed myself with ovarian torsion last year. The pain was indescribable and couldn’t even keep down sips of water.
Went to A&E. Medical staff tried to diagnose me with a kidney stone despite having no issue with peeing. Just saw I was fat and ignored my long standing PCOS diagnosis.
Multiple ultrasounds showed no calculi, but moving the wand over to just above my uterus did show my left ovary had dislodged and was hanging out there, being strangled by a 9cm cyst.
One salpingooophrectomy later and my pain was resolved. My creatinine levels were high for several days, putting me in AKI 2, but that’s because I was dehydrated.
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#14
I’m not a medical professional, but have spent a lot of time in the hospital and know my body and medical history. A few years ago, I started noticing memory loss, confusion, getting lost in familiar places, etc. and it occurred immediately after falling and hitting my head. I was afraid it was dementia despite my age (40). I talked to one of my drs who started a year long process of figuring out what was wrong. It turns out that I have a very rare form of early onset vascular dementia (there’s no treatment, surgery, or medication). I am 44 (diagnosed at 40). I’m glad to have an answer and suspected it was something like this but it is much worse than I could’ve thought.
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#15
I’ve got a double whammy: I am in healthcare and recognized my own bipolar disorder and PTSD. Went and got evaluated, four psych diagnoses later, and here we are lol.
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#16
Not a medical professional- I had been very sick with really basic symptoms tired, fevers, sore throats etc. on and off for three months, we tried lots of treatments but nothing worked. When getting a blood panel ordered one day I suggested doing a test for Lyme as I had pulled many ticks off me a long time ago and had read it can sit dormant in your body for years sometimes. My doctor, who was a DO, was hesitant to order the test. We talked about it for a while and he finally asked if it would give me peace of mind, I said yes and he said then it’s worth ordering the test if it will help my mental health. He later told me it was a first for him that a patients suggestion led to a correct diagnosis, and he’d be practicing for decades. Made a full recovery with some antibiotics and avoided a life of agony and medical complications.
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#17
I have narcolepsy and I only got diagnosed after bringing in a bunch of measurement tools I found on the national narcolepsy support page to my doctor. I have a symptom that is basically only present in people who have Type 1 narcolepsy (cataplexy) and I only realized that wasn’t just some strange quirk everyone has when I was joking about it with friends, assuming they all experience it too (they did not lol) and googling that was what brought me to the diagnosis. It was confirmed with a daytime sleep test.
Narcolepsy is frequently misdiagnosed as ADHD and/or depression, and the front line treatment of both is stimulants to stay awake, or antidepressants, which can improve cataplexy symptoms, so my symptoms were well masked for a few years. But then I got COVID, and my symptoms became much, much more severe, and the stimulants stopped working. Now I take a better treatment that actually helps me.
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#18
A friend of mine who’s a journalist was interviewing a doctor about celiac disease when she realized she had all the symptoms.
She went to her GP to confirm and yes, she has celiac disease.
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#19
I’m not a doctor or nurse. This is about myself, hope that’s ok.
TLDR: I Google-diagnosed a liver problem a decade ago (with assist from by my nursing baby), but no one believed me. I now have a big ole tumor in my liver.
Nearly 10 years ago when I was breastfeeding and pumping, it became apparent that my baby would not drink pumped milk that was more than a few hours old. (It was all properly handled and stored.) I started taste testing and noticed that any milk not fresh-off-the-teat had a soapy taste. Not rancid or spoiled. Soapy. It didn’t take much googling to find out that some women have excess lipase in their milk which breaks down the fats quickly, causing the odd flavor but not affecting the quality otherwise. I learned heating it to near-scalding right after pumping halted the effect of the lipase and it could then be stored. (I had the throw away so much frozen milk, it was heartbreaking.) I talked to several lactation consultants, nurses, and doctors; no one had ever heard of it and despite having printed off several articles, they didn’t take me seriously. Anyways, I also learned that this is liver-related so I eventually convinced a doctor to run a blood panel to look at liver enzymes. A few slightly elevated levels, but nothing outside of normal thresholds. I gave up trying to find an explanation and just continued the PIA yet effective regimen of heating the milk.
Well two days ago I had an ultrasound of my abdomen. They didn’t find what they were looking for, but the radiologist found a liver tumor. I’m terrified to find out what this means, but also quite eager to talk to the hepatologist. Was the soapy breast milk in fact an early sign of liver trouble? Doesn’t really change anything, except that I might finally get some sweet sweet vindication.
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#20
Also not a medical professional, but I diagnosed myself and my doctor was pretty flummoxed.
For years I had horrible periods, and had that whole ‘could be endo, could be fibroids’ runaround. But I also couldn’t use tampons – I would somehow just bleed past them, which made less than no sense – and my period cycle was so off sometimes I swore it was like I had two uteruses.
Then one day I was listening to a podcast and a woman started talking about her experience of living with two uteruses. And I was like ‘wait, that’s me’.
Told the GP, she reluctantly sent me for the scans, told me it almost certainly wasn’t that given the rarity. But yep, turns out I have two uteruses, cervixes and vaginas, and one unit of a kidney instead of the factory-issue two.
Also my mum thought I was mad and jokingly bet me a car I didn’t have two uteruses. Still chasing her up on that.
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#21
After an egg retrieval, I got myself to the ER and told them I definitely had a severe case of ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome. I thought it was a no-brainer. Boston IVF had warned me of what to look for and I had nearly every symptom, including the “go immediately to the ER” ones.
The ER doc kind of laughs and goes, “Maybe we should avoid googling symptoms.”
He recommended tylenol and was going to discharge me!
It took me forever to convince them to just do imaging and check my ovaries— first time I’ve ever heard a doctor say, “That can’t be right.”
My ovaries were each larger than a grapefruit. They called the on-call OBGYN, who admitted me immediately. Per my OB, I’m the only person my (tiny) hospital has ever had to admit for severe OHSS.
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#22
Diagnosed myself. Didn’t have any dramatic symptoms other than poor appetite and fatigue. I knew I had something going on above my waist but not in my chest. Drs blew me off so I got a lung scan due to smoking history. Kidney cancer. Tumor was on the upper part and outside of the kidney. Small tumor, had a partial nephrectomy, 3rd post-surgery scan coming up. .
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#23
I’m not a doctor or a nurse, but I’ve got one.
My younger brother dealt with persistent chronic ear infections and was supposedly diagnosed with eczema in his ears. They would often weep pus that smelled foul and he would swab them every day. They were red and flaky inside, which prompted the eczema diagnosis, but I don’t think explained the pus?
So after 10 years of dealing with this, he gets fed up with it and decides to send off samples of his own for private testing so he could review every single bacteria that was present himself.
Turns out the biggest colony was Candida.
He was able to receive a now family famous prescription for his vaginal yeast infection, which cleared up his problem within 3 days.
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#24
Not a medical professional, but one of my aunts was born in the 1930s and became a registered dietician. She self-diagnosed as having celiac’s in the early 1960s, which was almost unheard-of at that time. .
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#25
I’ve diagnosed myself with many things and gone to the doctor about it.
The only thing I ever got right was OCD, which explained why I diagnosed myself so many times before…
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#26
My husband and I were at a show with no phones allowed and when we got out, we had like 20 missed calls from my parents who were babysitting our then five-month-old baby. She had started projectile vomiting then went into shock, barely breathing and a really weak pulse. By the time we got back to her, she was starting to feel better, but I did some research that evening and figured out she had Food Protein-Induced Intercollitis Syndrome, which made the next few years really awful. My husband is a doctor now but wasn’t even in med school yet at that point, but as he got more training we realized how lucky we are that she survived.
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#27
I don’t know if it’s “impressive” but my oldest child spent years with cyclic vomiting syndrome before I finally went to Dr. Google and figured it out. He was getting sick and vomiting about once a month for a while and my husband at the time had a job that was really flexible with him taking time off for kids so we didn’t think too much about it. The first few times we really just thought it must be something he ate or had a stomach bug or something. Then one month when he was around 5 or 6 it happened 3 times in the month and I thought, “this can’t be normal. It’s clearly not a contagious thing because no one else in the house ever gets sick when he does” It was also getting to a point where calling out of work was getting excessive, but we also knew we couldn’t send him to daycare/school when he was puking so much.
The hardest part was figuring out what to type to get to the end diagnosis. Most results just kept being warnings of when to take your kid to the doctor/ER after too long of vomiting, not what to do/what it is if the vomiting is occuring very frequently.
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#28
Not a doctor or nurse, but I self-diagnosed my diabetes by noticing a weird thing and Googling it.
I noticed an influx of ants were attracted to the areas around the toilet in my bathroom. I didn’t think much of it other than trying to figure out where the hell they were coming from.
After a few weeks of this continuing I Googled “ants attracted to toilet” and one of the results was excess sugar in urine and mention of diabetes. Since I was pretty much the only one that used that bathroom I made a doctor’s appointment to get it checked and sure enough I was diabetic.
Once my A1C was in line the ants were no longer a problem. It sucked to be diagnosed with diabetes, but I am thankful it was caught and now I have a story to tell.
Image source: jdzeller
#29
I am a medical professional, but that’s kind of irrelevant because I was still in college at the time. One day I woke up and felt a lump under my chin in my neck and had a hell of a sore throat. I go look in the mirror and its about the size of a golf ball. After consulting doctor google I figured I had an infection in one of my salivary glands. My mom picked me up to take me to the hospital, they took one look at me and admitted me right away because they were concerned it if got any bigger it would cut off my airway. After some tests and imaging guess what I had? An infection in one of my salivary glands. Doctor said this was relatively rare because healthy people just don’t get those very often. However, I also have Crohn’s disease and was taking immunosuppressants for that, which brought my immune system down just enough for something like this.
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#30
….way back when, after baby #2, I started gaining weight, felt like I had been run over by a truck (!), and couldn’t remember basic words like chair/table. I made an appt. with my OBGYN, ‘you’re depressed’ even though I denied feeling depressed, end of consult. A week or 2 later, I remembered I had a family history of low thyroid (not that it’s necessarily familial) and made another appointment- oh!! My heart rate was 28! No wonder my mentation was garbage! I basically had no thyroid function- these days I can’t imagine having a doc appt. where vital signs weren’t checked- years later became ICU RN….
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#31
I diagnosed my mother’s PEs (pulmonary embolisms). She’d had abdominal surgery the week prior and made an off the cuff remark about having to sleep upright as she was short of breath when lying down. That didn’t sit right with me so a quick google told me about how PEs can happen, especially after major abdo surgery. Told her to get to emerg, STAT—sure enough, 3 PEs. She’s fine now, thankfully, but she sure as hell could’ve had a stroke if she hadn’t have mentioned anything.
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#32
Not me but I had a friend who had this with…porphyria.
We just used to call him ‘the vampire’ because of the symptoms. Then he noted it matched for porphyria, but hey, that’s rare, so surely not…
Welp, he had that experience where the diagnosing professional says ‘Hang on, do you mind if I bring a bunch of students in…’.
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#33
I was the self diagnosing patient, not the doctor.
I went to the doctor complaining of being very tired when in my mid 30s, got sent to the lab to get blood tests taken and sent home. No reason found. Went back a couple weeks later complaining that I was still unusually tired, and that I’d coughed once and that coughed something up that looked like what I was coughing up a lot of when I had pneumonia when I was 12. No, I wasn’t coughing generally. No coughing, no fever, no shortness of breath, my O2 levels were fine… But I thought I had pneumonia! The doctor looked at me – and I remember this quote EXACTLY – and said, “Well, I DON’T think you have pneumonia. But out of an ABUNDANCE OF CAUTION I will send you to get x-rays taken.” Went downstairs to the imaging lab, waiting an hour, got my x-rays, went home. Got a call the next day. “Hey, guess what!? You have PNEUMONIA!” Atypical walking pneumonia, yup.
A few years later, my dad got what we think was covid (before tests were available), and tho he recovered for a bit he then declined again. I told him I thought he had pneumonia, that I had atypical symptoms, that everyone always said we were so similar that maybe that included the immune system and that he should go to his doctor and ask to be checked for it. He wasn’t coughing either. I’ll never know if he went to the doctor or not. He was found unresponsive about a week later and spent 3 weeks in a medically induced coma, never fully woke up/spoke again. Doctor given “cause of death” was sepsis caused by 2 different types of pneumonia bacteria in his lungs.
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#34
Not a medical professional, but I diagnosed my own bipolar 1 disorder after years of misdiagnoses. Psychiatrists and therapists said I had depression, anxiety, ADHD, etc etc but nobody ever suspected bipolar even when I was having obvious full-blown manic episodes. Before I figured it out nobody ever took me seriously and just called me “energetic” and “quirky” smh. 4 years in remission and I’m doing great now.
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#35
Not a medical professional, but I diagnosed my own skin cancer, despite being dismissed and told it was just a pimple. Luckily slow growing and I’m fine now, but my dermatologist tells her residents about my story when i go for check ups.
Also diagnosed a friend with multiple sclerosis based on his vision symptoms.. I was really hoping to be wrong on that.
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#36
My sister has a chronic illness and was constantly sick and in the hospital a lot when we were children. It was traumatizing. After a few years of hospitalizations and several doctors that couldn’t figure out what was causing the intense migraines that debilitated her, my mother’s several Google searches led her to finding Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension (pseudotumor cerebri). Doctors wouldn’t diagnose her for a while with it even after mom insisted this was it because it’s most common in obese women that are 20-45 y/o and she was of a healthy weight and under 15 y/o. She’s since had many surgeries in her brain and spine in which a shunt was implanted each time to drain the fluid from her skull and she’s now on the right medications at 32y/o, but my mom’s googling and her persistence is what ultimately ended in her receiving the correct diagnosis, finally.
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#37
My father noticed an unusual pattern in his CBC (complete blood count) labs over a period of 5 years, so he did a little online research. Made an appointment with his doctor at Kaiser and told them he thought he had leukemia. They told him no, there’s no way you have it. So he got a second opinion at an academic teaching/research hospital and wouldn’t you know it, it was leukemia, CLL. At the time there wasn’t a cure, but he did a bunch of research, got himself into some clinical trials, and he’s been in remission for 8 years now.
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#38
When I wanted a referral for my plantar fasciitis to a podiatrist and the PA requested I come in for a check up. 5 minutes in she diagnosed me with plantar fasciitis. So now I got an extra bill. Yay.
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#39
PhD, not MD… I correctly diagnosed my child with a very rare genetic disorder. Three different specialists had missed their respective positive tests.
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#40
Had a patient come into the ER complaining of unbearable pain and was yelling aloud any time she was touched. Several of the staff were saying before I went in “Oh great, another medicine-seeker is here…” -.-
Well, I took her history and performed an exam. She said I think I have cancer. It has to be bone cancer or something wrong with my bones. (Mind you she said she hadn’t completed high school and did not mention looking anything up on in internet) Anyhow, I so much as placed a hand on her or she moved an inkling, the patient would scream out in pain. Turns out she had some lytic bone lesions and was a textbook case of Multiple Myeloma (white blood cell cancer in the bones that leads to horrible bone pain and pathologic fractures- yes she didn’t TECHNICALLY have BONE cancer but rather plasma cell cancer). From that day on, I never treat a patient coming in with pain as a patient just malingering but really try to get to the bottom of the source and cause of the pain. Furthermore, people presenting to the healthcare system who practitioners may label as “d**g-seekers” often do have some sort of pain (yes, psychological pain is STILL pain, yet has a different treatment than handing out opiates). Unfortunately, the treatment those patients need is seen as “not my job” or “I don’t have time for that” as I have heard it put as the patient’s get kicked to the curb or handed a script to get them out of the office or ER. Sadly, the US health system in my area has been failing patients afflicted by mental health IMO.
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#41
I had a guy come in who said, “I think I have diabetes. I have a shop out back with no bathroom, so whenever I take a pee break I just pee on the ground. Every time I take a pee the bees all come and land on it”.
He was right.
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#42
My mom was acting insane…I had to call 911. I told the ER to test her for an UTI. I was right!
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#43
Not a medical professional but I was also carer once for the elderly and disabled. I had a client who was in his late 40s and had Multiple System Astrophy (MSA).
He had been perfectly healthy his whole life. Had been a police officer for many years before working in Children’s services and had 3 teenage daughters.
So why did he go to the doctors? He had been playing Squash with his brother and lost a game. He had never ever lost a game of squash to his brother and they were both shocked. He got checked shortly after and was diagnosed with MSA.
Within a few years he was losing his mobility and was having difficulty with concentrating. He would have absent seizures and continence issues. Eventually, he lost all mobility and had breathing difficulties. He passed away around the age of 50.
One of the loveliest blokes I ever met. His wife was wonderful too. Broke my heart to know he would never see his daughters graduate uni or get married. They loved him so much.
I still think about them sometimes and really hope they are doing okay.
Image source: fried_egg_on_toast
#44
Had I girl come in my consultory saying “Doc, I’ve been having this sores in my mouth for quite a while now and they come and go and well, I’ve been reading online and uhmm I think I have syphilis”
Checked her mouth, she had nothing, and I told her that primary syphilitic lesions didn’t usually reappear but still ran the labs because syphilis is known for having unusual manifestations
Next time she shows up, saying “Uhmm doc I got my results and… I have syphilis”. She did.
Image source: madkeepz
#45
My sister had a goiter that was very large that turned out to be thyroid cancer. She had surgery and did great. About 6 months later I was putting on moisturizer and felt a lump going from behind my ear to the center of my throat. They did surgery and told me it wasn’t cancer, but a follicular variant. Well, after my surgery and about a year later at the ultrasound, they found a growth on my lymph node extremely close to my esophagus. The diagnosis from the biopsy? Cancer. So, i underwent another neck surgery where maybe 25 or so lymph nodes were removed. Further ultrasounds and thyroid numbers have been good.
Image source: MurkyEon
#46
I have a drop kidney, its where the ligaments that hold my kidneys in place are weakened and my right kidney hangs down about 5 inches too low.
it’s a rare condition and it takes a bunch of convincing drs to get the right imaging done.
I also called the fact that I have 4 slipped discs, cervical kyphosis and nerve damage in my lower back causing problems in my pelvis.
All which took years of trying to tell doctors to get the right x-rays and mris.
Image source: MyLife-is-a-diceRoll
#47
Patient came into ER complaining at first of indigestion but causing severe pain. I asked what he ate, he said taco bell, and I made a slightly inappropriate poop joke regarding that.
He laughed and said he was having a heart attack. Obviously he just thought I was super funny.
Turns out I’m not.
Image source: KFCsecretpolice
#48
I was the patient. After2 years of walking around hospitals with no real improvement in my health and tons of wrong diagnostics I just walked into my neurologists office and told him I have Myastenia gravis. – I was right.
Image source: uniqueuser1409
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