In many places of the world, the Covid-19 pandemic has reshaped the way people view health care. In the United States, for example, a nationwide survey led by Northeastern University found that public trust in physicians and hospitals plummeted, going from 71.5% in April 2020 to an abysmal 40.1% in January 2024.
And the consequences of this can look surprisingly revealing. There’s a thread on Reddit where healthcare professionals have been sharing the things patients try to keep a secret from them—ranging from minor embarrassments to bizarre habits—and it proves that doctors are detectives just as much as they’re medical experts, constantly piecing together clues to get the full story.
#1
I’m a pediatric dentist, so maybe not the type of doctor you were looking for, but this one throws me for a loop every time so I’ll share it. When I sedate kids they have to be NPO for 8 hours before, so I always ask if they had anything to eat or drink in the morning. Parents NEVER want to admit their kid ate or drank, even when I remind them it’s very important because if they vomit and aspirate they could die. Often they try to minimize it and say it was just a few bites, but one kid walked in eating a bag of Cheetos at reception and then the parent insisted to me that they hadn’t eaten. Yeah, I’m 100% not sedating your child today.
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#2
Not a doctor, but a nurse. When you come in to the hospital wanting to detox, and I ask you how much you drink, please stop lying to me. Withdrawal from alcohol is NASTY but I can make it a little more bearable. If it’s 2 bottles of vodka a day, TELL ME so I can medicate you accordingly. You’ll thank me later when you aren’t having a seizure.
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#3
Had a patient refuse to admit he swallowed a pen, even though an x-ray showed the pen in his small bowel and we took the pen out during an emergency surgery.
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#4
I can literally smell the smoke on your clothes and breath, see the nicotine stains on your fingers, and you’re trying to tell me you quit smoking 10 years ago?
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#5
Am vet student. Many clients like to say “I don’t over feed my dog/cat, thats just their normal size!” when their pet looks like a watermelon.
Image source: Momordicas, Getty Images/unsplash (not the actual photo)
#6
Once had a woman come in for a “possible yeast infection”. On exam she had a glass bottle stuck in her vaginal filled with urine. Totally wouldn’t admit it was hers or explain how it got there even after we removed it. Just kept saying “I think this is all a joke and you put it up there”.
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#7
Not a doctor (yet) but was volunteering in the emerg ward and a woman came in with her pregnant daughter. Not only did she refuse to believe her daughter was pregnant, but was feeding her laxatives to “deal with the extra weight.” It was pretty horrible stuff.
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#8
Had an elderly lady from a nursing home come in super altered. She would wake up briefly to answer questions but then would be out like a light seconds later. Usually in this case we assume it’s from infection, stroke, etc. but we still ask about d**g use (legal and illicit) since it can cause that kind of thing. Lady denied several times she didn’t take anything other than prescribed meds. Finally, as we’re about to intubate her (put her on a ventilator) since she was getting worse, we cut off her bra and out pops a little baggy with some white powder and a baby straw. We gave her some Narcan and she gasps herself awake. Even after that still took her a long time before she said “well maybe I did take some d***s from a friend…” Since then I’ve trusted no one when it comes to denying d**g use.
Edit: just to clarify, I’m not saying I think everyone is a d**g a****t, I’m just saying if you come in acting super out of it, you’re probably going to get Narcan just to cover all the bases.
Also, I’m aware that light seconds are not a measure of time…I used the phrase “out like a light” followed by the word seconds. Just confusingly worded I guess.
Image source: thruthelurkingglass, Wavebreak Media/freepik (not the actual photo)
#9
How the remote control to a Zenith television wound up in the r****m of a 54 year old father of two?
They stopped making Zenith Television sets years ago. From a medical perspective, why do you still own this remote?
Image source: anon, DC Studio/freepik (not the actual photo)
#10
This one is sad, from my old roommate
Girl had a very large lump on her breast that she didn’t tell the doctors about. She actually went to the hospital for migraines, saying they were getting increasingly bad. When they found the lump, they asked why she didn’t say she had that.
She said she knew it was going to k**l her eventually, but she just wanted to get rid of the migraines because they giving her a lot of pain in her last months.
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#11
That they don’t know how to read. I’ve been taught the trick of handing a paper upside down to them to see if they can read. It’s good to know if they dont, so you can make EXTRA sure they have a full understanding of their instructions instead of saying to read the details on the sheet .
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#12
Not a dr. But worked in a hospital for a long time.
Had a pt come in that had OD on h****n. Was able to get him set on that front, however he had necrotizing fasciitis in his pectoral from injecting there.
He was septic and honestly a bit of an a*****e. He kept trying to tell us the reason he was there was because of a motorcycle accident.
We all knew but he was in absolute denial. He eventually heals up and transfers out, after a couple months.
He came back about 6 months later to say thank you to all of us and to apologize for all the lies and assholish behavior.
Seems it was enough to get him out of that life and onto a new one. I think about him now and then and hope he stayed clean.
Image source: stayathmdad, engin akyurt/unsplash (not the actual photo)
#13
I’m a CT tech and I was to scan a woman’s abdomen for belly pain. She and her girlfriend were there. I have to have a pregnancy test. I have to have one done. I can’t radiate a fetus. I even ask nuns so no exceptions. She denies up and down she’s pregnant, and then, after the test I did, it said she was. She denied it and demanded a blood test, since she was a lesbian and *never* has s*x with men.
Well the blood test came back positive also (surprise!) And the argument that ensued was biblical. She was arguing with her girlfriend and the nurses and the doctor. I never ended up scanning her and they chalked up her pain to her being pregnant. The look on her girlfriend’s face when I said it came back positive was one I will never forget.
Edit: because I’ve gotten this comment a lot, the woman in the room with the patient was her SO and they had been together a long time, and the patient had given her SO permission, in writing, to allow her to hear her medical information. Many of you are saying “you shouldn’t have told her in front of her SO!” and you’re partially right in a way, but, the patient had given her SO that permission, and I did not question it. Had she not, I would have asked her SO to leave the room. You can give anyone you deem necessary access (or no access!) to your medical information. It’s not limited to spouses.
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#14
When was their last meal. They think they can fool their PET Scan, end up losing money, time and over irradiated.
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#15
There was a women sent in by her family doctor for urinating some blood
We put a camera into her bladder with her awake, looking to exclude a tumor.
We found her bladder full of citrus seeds/pits. So many of them.
When asked why she put them there she said ‘well I eat a lot of fruit’ and wouldn’t accept any responsibility for them being there.
Image source: raftsa, Getty Images/unsplash (not the actual photo)
#16
Only work records in a clinic, but we had a woman come in with a report of vaginal odor. All well and good, it happens all the time in an Ob/Gyn clinic. What she hadn’t bothered to say was that she’d gotten a tampon stuck around the end of her last period. She’d gone through menopause 7 years prior.
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#17
Not a doctor but my husband. He had a 17 year old girl with abdominal pains come into the ER with her Mum, turns out she’s in full-blown labour. Assures them she can’t be pregnant, she’s a virgin. The baby is literally crowning right there in ER (no maternity ward in their hospital and she was in advanced labour when she arrived) and she still insists she’s a virgin.
Edit: poor wording … my husband was the doctor, not the 17 year old girl.
Image source: anon, EyeEm/freepik (not the actual photo)
#18
Not a doctor but many years ago was working as an assistant to an occupational therapist.
We got a call out to help mobilise a woman who had been morbidly obese and was told to lose weight. We learned from the daughter she had GAINED weight but her mother would refuse to come clean on what she was eating. All the daughter knew was that her mother may have been eating deep-fried food due to the vast amounts of cooking oil she found in the pantry.
When we arrived, she had gained an extra six kilos but insisted she had lost weight. She did not look it. Before we began mobilising her and check her living room for trip hazards (she also had horrendous knees) we took a look at the pantry.
Olive oil, peanut oil, sesame oil, any kind of common cooking oil you can find off a supermarket shelf, she had it. A vast stockpile of oil. We asked what she was frying with the oil. She insisted that she wasn’t frying anything and that she was eating healthy since the oils she used were ‘healthy’. We had to explain to her that oils are still fatty and will still contribute to weight gain.
After a bit of poking around the pantry, I noticed that for the amount of oil she had, she had very little in food that could be traditionally fried. She also had little in other foodstuffs that could explain the obesity.
I brought it up with the therapist and the therapist then demanded the truth. We couldn’t provide complete healthcare until we knew everything.
She admitted that she thought healthy oils would help her lose weight and suppress the appetite so she had taken to drinking the bottles of oil whenever she got hungry.
Needless to say, we disposed of most of the bottle of oil and set her up for a home visit with a dietitian.
Image source: Iwatoori, Getty Images/unsplash (not the actual photo)
#19
I volunteer at an ER. Prisoner shoved a ball point pen up his urethra to get out of being stabbed, iirc. Insisted he had no idea how it got there. We spent hours deliberating how to get it out, and he just reaches down, still in his handcuffs, and pulls it out himself.
Edit: You can’t get stabbed if you’re not in the prison, and any sort of s*******m will land you on s*****e watch (which is brutal as well). Weird s*x stuff though, no problem.
Image source: meh817, Curated Lifestyle/unsplash (not the actual photo)
#20
Nurse here: had a patient accuse me of s******g in her bed, and threaten to sue me for malpractice.
Key note: she never got out of her bed.
Image source: anon, Getty Images/unsplash (not the actual photo)
#21
I admitted a guy for chest pain. As part of the workup, I did a urine d**g screen which came back positive for c*****e.
After the rest of his cardiac workup was negative, I said to him, “Good news, you didn’t have a heart attack. It’s likely that your chest pain was caused by c*****e.”
His answer: “I didn’t use c*****e. See, I was at a party and people had some lines of c*****e out on a table. As I was walking by, an oscillating fan blew the c*****e into my face, which is why my urine was positive.”
Mmmhmm. Got it.
Image source: anon, Curated Lifestyle/unsplash (not the actual photo)
#22
Nurse here. Had parents bring their 3 year old son to the emergency department for one month of abdominal pain that kept getting worse. I ask all the routine questions for this complaint, lots of questions about his poop….is it bloody? Diarrhea? Mucous? When was his last bowel movement? Any changes in the stool? They deny any other concerning symptoms but abdominal pain.
We do bloodwork, ultrasound, X-ray. Everything comes back completely normal but the kid is intermittently screaming in pain, curled in a ball.
Over the next 5 hours I continue to repeat the same questions, I asked repeatedly if there was anything else going on that they could think of….nope.
The kid just doesn’t seem well but we have no reason to keep him, we decide to watch him a little longer, let him eat. The kid eats a bunch, a PBJ, apple juice, crackers, popsicle, no pain so we decide to send them home.
I bring in the discharge paperwork and I’m about to start going over instructions and they dad goes “You know…..for the past 3 months he’s had A LOT of worms in his poop”
WORMS. F*****g worms. You spent 6+ hours denying worms. I literally just turned around and walked out of the room without saying a word. I was laughing almost to the point of tears. Could not wait to tell my resident. Deworming medications, a s**t load of wasted time, and they were on their way.
Image source: anon, Getty Images/unsplash (not the actual photo)
#23
I’m a nurse, not a doctor, but it’s amazing how many patients lie about how much they drink. Dude, we aren’t judging you. We just want to know if we need to worry about you detoxing when you come out of open heart (or any other) surgery!
ETA: A lot of comments in here seem to be about your personal doctor visits. My comment was very specifically referring to major surgery. All I am saying is this: If you’re going to land in the hospital for a significant amount of time and you’re an alcoholic, it is to your benefit and safety to be honest about that, because the odds that you will withdraw in your time there is high. If providers know, they can plan to manage that so you don’t withdraw.
Last, sounds like a lot of you have run into s****y, judgy people in healthcare. We aren’t all like that. And even the judgy ones really don’t want you to detox on their shift.
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#24
Had a patient in hospital, I forget what for. The point is that he disappeared for a few hours. When he came back he was tachycardic to 160bpm, massive pupils, couldn’t sit still. We asked him what he’d taken while he was out. Nothing, he swears, he went to the puband just drank lemonade. Ok, we say, were gonna take some blood and find out what you’ve taken. He then pipes up thay the friends he was with would think it was funny to spike his drink. What, we asked, did he think they might have spiked his drink with? Speed, he says.
What do you know, bloods confirmed that he had taken speed. But he insists he didn’t take it, his drink was spiked.
Image source: Thenumberthirtyseven, Curated Lifestyle/unsplash (not the actual photo)
#25
I have told this story before on Reddit, but not for awhile. A story that resides at the nexus of oncology and psychiatry:
Middle-aged man enter ER in sweatpants. Worked as an accountant but currently unemployed. He tells me that a urologist had diagnosed him with inflammation of his epididymis three years earlier but he hadn’t followed through on the treatment, and that he now wanted to get things taken care of.
During the physical exam I see a grapefruit sized mass in his s*****m. It was not subtle in any way. I call in urology and order a CT scan. I tell the guy that this isn’t inflammation, it is a tumor and we need to do more tests to find out what type of tumor.
He stops me and tells me he didn’t understand what I had said, could I please repeat it. Then he pulls out a pad of paper and writes down my exact words and sits there staring at the words for a few minutes.
I just felt really sorry for the guy.
Image source: lord_wilmore
#26
Other than all the random things that end up in rectums accidentally?
Drunk electrician with the longest drill bit I’ve ever seen sticking through both legs and impaling his s*****m in between like a really gross kabob. He was so drunk he thought he broke his hip, denied owning any drill bits or for that matter having been drinking.
Most common are the numerous d**g/tox screens we do that come back positive for something and EVERYONE is shocked, borderline offended it got into their system.
Image source: Vocalscpunk, freepik (not the actual photo)
#27
That she could actually see.
We had this lady that came into the ER at least once per month usually cheat pain (she was 30s morbidly obese) she had seen multiple specialist. Had her heart/lungs/GI system examined in almost every conceivable way. One night she comes in the with sudden onset blindness. Not her first time with this complaint either last time she got a trip to the retina specialist.
When I examine her I walk around her bed and she tells her friend to get her feet off the chair so I can get by. She plays it off supercool by adding “If you have your feet up like you always do”
Then the neuro exam. I have her touch her nose then touch my finger. Her idea of how a blind person would preform this exam is to touch her nose then wobble her hand from side to side as she touched the end of my finger.
Not to mention the near constant eye contact as we talked. I would ask a question and start moving while she talked and her she would follow my eye perfectly.
She was extremely relieved to find out she had conversion disorder and that her sight would be back soon.
Edit: Maybe it was factitous disorder. I tend to believe all her chest pains and crazy complaints were real feelings she was having due to a number of her social/psych issues. In the ER at midnight it’s a lot easier to tell her it is a symptom of dealing with whatever social drama was happening in her life and that her eyes worked fine instead of telling her she was lying to me for some gain. Either way she was sick and needed reassurance. She was genuinely relieved though.
On the finger to nose test she touched my finger on the first try but instead of a straight line she moved her hand back and forth about the 3 inches the whole way there but directly there. My finger was probably 2 feet in front of her face.
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#28
I might be to late for the party. Also English is not my first language and I’m on mobile. I’m an internal medicine resident. Had a patient with sepsis that was being seen by the urology department. When I first read his clinical history it stated something along the lines of: “infected wound in the p***s, patient claims he doesn’t know how he got it.”
So I begin my assessment and ask him about his wound. Indeed, he claimed he didn’t know how it happened. I decided that the priority was to stabilize the patient and I made some adjustments to antibiotics and other meds.
Well the guy went downhill, the sepsis became severe even though he was with the strongest antibiotics we had and two different vasopressors. His blood pressure was through the floor and eventually he needed intubation and went to the ICU.
He managed to survive after a complete penectomy. And about 2 weeks later I saw him again.
Turns out the dude was trying to get his dog to lick his p***s, and put on some peanut butter on it. Naturally the dog bit him. He didn’t seek medical help for about 10 days before the pain and fever was to much. If we knew from the beginning that the wound was inflicted that way the antibiotic would have been different, probably would have made a difference.
I still feel sorry for that guy, but with a wound like that he is lucky to be alive.
Edit: I should’ve said that a total penectomy is total removal of the p***s. Sorry for all of you that went to Google images.
Image source: Medical_Madness
#29
I am a doctor. Not a single ‘random thing up my a*s’ is weird to me anymore. I’ve heard or seen it all. Nor is it that surprising when somebody is whacko enough to claim they got Lyme disease sexually from their husband, who got it vertically from his mother, and that’s why they are sterile… (if you aren’t aware, this is bonkers)
The actual weirdest thing for me was that one time when a severely obese person just refused to admit they ate anything but 1 small salad a day. It just comes down to math. You cannot get up to 500lbs unless you put 500lbs of stuff into you at a decent pace. Plus we found a snack wrapper in the inaccessible folds of your pannus… jeebus.
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#30
You weren’t breathing. We gave you narcan. You started breathing again, woke up, and then deny you used a narcotic. Yeah, alright.
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#31
Med student. Went to see a patient for my practice physical. These are all volunteers and we don’t get charts or anything just a slip of paper with their name and chief complaint.
I walk into the room and this older gentleman is holding his cup of coffee and didn’t shake my hand which threw me off guard. Then I noticed one of his hands was much weaker and kind of scrunched up and he didn’t move it. So I asked him about it and he was like, “Nah it’s fine. See?” and proceeded to move it like a 1/2 inch. It clearly was not fine.
I’m sweating now cuz these are mainly just opportunities to talk with patients and they’re supposed to be a breeze but this guy looks like he had a stroke and had no idea. Turns out he was just messing with me, but I was ready to call in a real doctor cause I was freaking the f**k out!
Edit: The dude really did have a stroke!! It was 15 years ago and only affected his one arm he just like to pretend it was fine! Once he made that clear the rest of the history/physical was great.
Image source: ShermansBlindandRugs
#32
So in my story, im actually the patient not telling the doctor something, but i felt like it was good enought and relevant enough to share.
But when i was like 13 or so i ended up with a urinary tract infection, which was odd because im a guy. I ended up having to go to the childrens hospital and had to go through all this stuff to try and look at it and fix itand whatever doctors do for a uti. What i didn’t tell them, and still havent told anyone except my wife, was that this happened because i was curious what it would feel like to shoot water up my dong with a hotel shampoo bottle.
Not great.
But if you pump air up there it makes a mini fart sound when it comes out so i guess thats a plus.
Image source: ders____
#33
Not a doctor but work in an ER. One day some pretty young parents brought their toddler in because he was super lethargic and not responding to any stimuli and the parents said they had no idea why. The staff were pretty concerned for him because those symptoms are a pretty big red flag for small kids. So we start running a bunch of tests including a d**g screen which ended up being positive for THC. The doc goes and talks to the parents about it and they finally broke down and admitted that the kid had eaten an entire bottle of their weed gummies while they weren’t paying attention a few hours earlier and was just high as s**t lol.
Image source: hoyboy96
#34
My patient presented over several months with recurrent huge abscesses that we couldn’t explain. She was in horrible pain. Had to stop working. We tested for everything. Eventually her husband called me that he found syringes in her medicine cabinet. We think she was injecting herself with fecal matter. When the syringes were found she stopped coming to her appointments.
To those asking why: I think she has Münchausen syndrome. She wanted the attention from being sick. I started getting suspicious when she always would get a new abscess before any court dates (CPS problems) and need a doctors note to get out of it. She denies everything and it’s very hard to have someone committed unless they are acutely s******l.
Image source: RowYourBoat2k
#35
Optician here. A few days ago a man called asking if he could see an optometrist asap. I told him we had no spots left and asked him what seemed to be the problem. He told me he felt he had an eye infection and it’s been 4 days since he can’t see properly from his left eye. Sometimes clients can complain from overtearing or swollen eyelids but no … He told me part of his field of vision was off for the past 4 days. We have indicators (such as flashes of light or dark spots) that tell us if we are dealing with an emergency worthy of being sent directly to the hospital for emergency intervention from the ophthalmology department and this was clearly it. I told him he has to go to the emergency room now.
He tells me he has a busy shift at work and is a supervisor. I told him again to go to the hospital ASAP and to take it seriously. He tells me that he can’t because his day will be scrapped. I told him to stop putting work over health and that this needed to be dealt with now. He still argues with me and tells me that he doesn’t feel like waiting in the emergency room for hours (in any case if you have symptoms resembling a retinal detachment you are seen almost immediately). I insist that he must go. He then tells me I’ll go after my day’s shift! I tell him to cut it out and GO!!
He then asks me if it’s an emergency and to tell him what he has. Given that I’m not allowed to give any diagnosis by the phone I told him to hurry to the hospital. He told me he would and I’m pretty sure he stuck to his plan of finishing the day. Retinal detachment can usually be treated if noticed quickly.
Image source: HFCB
#36
I guess it’s not super weird that this patient wouldn’t admit this, but it’s weird in the sense that it was super obvious what happened so he might as well just admit it.
I used to do patient registration in the ER. Two of us were wheeling around our computers and registering patients off of ambulances and getting patient information in rooms. A middle aged guy comes in on an ambulance and my coworker takes it. So I’m finishing up some paperwork and I go to our front office and pull up the patient tracker board so I can see what still needs to be done and a new patient pops up on the board…
Chief complaint: eyeliner pens stuck in p***s.
My coworker walks into the office looking scarred. She explained “The nurse asked him what happened and he said he slipped. She told him that doesn’t seem likely. So he said he had an itch and thought it would help.” We later found out from the nurse that he finally admitted that he “saw it on tv and thought it would feel good”. His 20-something year old daughter was with him, but she clearly had some form of developmental disability. It was all around a sad situation and I hope someone told him about sounding and he did some research on safe practices for kinks/fetishes. Apparently they were both lodged in there pretty badly.
Image source: FiresideFairytales, Getty Images/unsplash (not the actual photo)
#37
How a 20 ounce glass Coke bottle was lodged all the way up a guy’s r****m. He denied it vehemently in front of his wife. That was weird. And awkward…
Image source: altiif, EyeEm/freepik (not the actual photo)
#38
Starting residency this week, I posted a while back but will post it here again. It wasn’t super obvious at first, but after looking into her records it became clear:
So this happened on my psychiatry rotation in medical school, not currently in a psychiatry residency though.
There was a patient at an inpatient psychiatric facility for s******l ideation. She constantly insisted that she had a mass on her breasts and demanded to be physically examined only by male doctors. When the psychiatrist I was rotating under declined to perform a physical exam, she asked me to do it during my daily patient interview. I also declined physical exam, but had a bit of a hunch to check her medical records.
It turned out she had an ultrasound done a week before that found only normal breast tissue without masses. However, apparently this this lady had frequented many doctor’s offices with various complaints of an unspecific nature and would usually focus on breasts or vaginal complaints when she visited male physician’s offices.
We diagnosed her with factitious disorder (formerly known as Munchausen syndrome) and histrionic personality disorder. It seems her goal was mostly attention from medical professionals (she had lots of issues), but we also had to be careful to make sure she wasn’t fishing for a lawsuit. Patients like her are why doctors document everything meticulously.
So the patient wouldn’t admit to making things up all the time. According to the psychiatrist I was working with, she didn’t actually believe any of her “health problems” exist and her primary goal was the attention from medical professionals. If she actually believed she was sick, we would have diagnosed her with illness anxiety disorder, commonly known as hypochondria.
Image source: PMME_ur_lovely_boobs, Getty Images/unsplash (not the actual photo)
#39
Not a doctor but a nurse. Had a patient come in with a toothpick in his p***s. Refused to tell me how it got in there, insisting he was picking his teeth and it fell in.
Image source: ScienceofFish, syda_productions/freepik (not the actual photo)
#40
Being pregnant and also a virgin.
People actually believe women can get inseminated in a public pool or after their parents had s*x in the jacuzzi and the girl uses the jacuzzi and is inseminated by the father.
Image source: lavadrop5
#41
I’m a nurse. I had a kid once who I needed to get a urine sample from. He was 8. I gave him a cup & pointed him to the bathroom. I went to check on my other patients & came back, kid was still in the bathroom. I go knock on the door, “Hey buddy, you ok in there?”
**sink on full blast**
“UH…YEP! EVERYTHING’S FINE!”
I go back to his room a few minutes later & he hands me a bag full of water with a cup inside that also appears to be water. I pour the water out of the bag.
“Hey buddy, are you sure this is urine in this cup?“
” Yea! My pee is ALWAYS clear.”
Pt is wheeled off the Xray.
I check the temperature of the so-called urine in the cup. It was ironically the same temperature as the water from the faucet.
Come on little homie, you gotta do better than that.
Image source: BigBootyJudyWiper
#42
Patients lie about the most mundane things. They will tell you they don’t smoke cigarettes when you can smell it all over them, you can see a pack in their purse, and you physically saw them smoking outside before they came in for their appointment. That’s not what annoys me though…
What annoys me most is that patients will Google what they think is their diagnosis, admit they did, get their diagnosis right, then argue with you about the recommended treatment and deny having read that also. The classic example is bronchitis. Patients will Google it, read the Wikipedia article, then still come in and demand antibiotics. When you confront them with this they will pretend they didn’t know that they read that antibiotics do not work. They do this with almost any disease in which the treatment is conservative management and yet they will still come in asking for treatment that has no evidence. If you’re going to become an internet expert, don’t do it 50% and deny you didn’t read the part about treatment.
EDIT: Roughly 80% of what comes into urgent cares can be managed at home with “do nothing,” rest, drink fluids, take Tylenol.
Image source: Ravager135
#43
Maybe not so weird because the person was whacked out of their mind, but once had a patient who was clearly on d***s and vehemently denying it. I’m not a doc, but I’m a lab tech and draw blood in the ED regularly. While I was drawing their blood the patient was screaming at me to stop letting the green men that were coming out of my arm touch them.
Turns out, they were tripping balls, but underage and refused to tell us anything for fear of their parents finding out.
Image source: Mina111406
#44
Having s*x. They were pregnant.
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#45
Not the doctor, but patient. Doctor asked me during a physical when my last test for gonorrhea and chlamydia was, and never asked whether I’ve been sexually active. I’m a virgin, my doctor was cute, and for some reason I felt embarrassed to admit I haven’t had s*x so just rolled with the recommended urine test..
$250+ and the expected negative results later, I felt really stupid. Looking back, pretty weird thing to not just admit, my doctor couldn’t care less what my s*x life was like. Would have saved me some money, yikes.
Edit: Am Male, not sure if that provides useful context or not. This was a routine, non symptomatic physical. I get yearly physicals, have never been asked to take an STI test before, and was asked this time if it’d be okay that I get tested. Fondle and cough was not performed at this physical, so opt outs were definitely in season.
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#46
Obligatory not a doctor, but it would probably be eating bugs.
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#47
Kind of the opposite situation, but I had to go to the ER because I couldn’t keep anything down and I was dehydrated. Doctor asks if its possible that I’m pregnant and I said I am sexually active, but I just finished my period, so it was unlikely. She just stared at me for a second and starting laughing, apparently no one ever just admits they have s*x and always tried to hide it, for some reason. Turns out I had a kidney infection anyways lol.
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#48
I had a patient who came with his boyfriend. He had severe abdominal pain.
He claimed it started when he had a difficult p*o. Tests showed he’d ruptured his colon and it turned out it’d happened using toys during s*x.
To me it’s weird because he’d introduced me to his boyfriend so it not like he needed to hide his sexuality.
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#49
That they can’t afford their meds (yep, America). It’s so weird, we can for sure tell you weren’t taking them, it’s put your life in serious danger and if you don’t fess up it could kick you off the transplant list for noncompliance. It’s such a taboo I guess to say you’re poor, you had to pick lights or meds, food or meds, gas or meds. It sounds so simple “doc I just couldn’t afford that and food” but it takes some work sometimes to get people to just tell us.
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#50
That they had maggots in their foot wound.
Patient with diabetes came in to see me in clinic.
Said foot had a wound.
I asked when they last looked at it.
They said that morning and this was an 11 am appointment.
Helped them take off their sock.
There were 4 maggots busily cleaning a pretty large ulcer on the side if the foot.
I threw up a little in my mouth and proceeded to remove the maggots and dress the wound (a d**n clean wound due to those maggots).
Image source: Quadruplem
#51
One time one of my patients wouldn’t admit that he drank a bunch of paint at a paint picnic party. he was totally covered in paint and he had all the symptoms of drinking paint but he wouldn’t admit to me that he was at a paint picnic party. I think he was ashamed of what he had done.
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#52
Not a doctor, but I work in a big, busy hospital. We had a 20ish year old obese woman come in complaining of severe abdominal pain. Before she was even examined it became clear that she was about to give birth. Side note- my hospital does not have labor and delivery- that is at our other campus a couple of miles away. This woman proceeded to give birth to a full term 8lb healthy boy in our ER and denied that she was pregnant and denied that the baby was hers (the placenta was still in her umbilical cord not cut- the Dr said “it’s a boy!” and she said “that’s not my baby!” mmmmmmmkay. Needless to say psych was called along with a team from the other hospital to take the baby over to their campus. I often wonder about that baby, and hope he is doing ok… hopefully the mom put him up for adoption and he ended up with some great parents.
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#53
Im an RN but I’ve had patients lie about not pooping because they are worried about a suppository. I make sure to go full worse case scenario about bowel obstructions, impaction, emergency surgery etc. It normally makes them follow my directions (take DR ordered bowel meds, order certain foods, drink fluid, walk if able, etc.)and scares the s**t (ha) out of them.
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#54
A friend’s mom wouldn’t admit my friend had scoliosis. Does that count?
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#55
How they really got a spider bite on their tongue.
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#56
Radiologist here.
I’ve seen lots of weird things but the weirdest someone wouldn’t admit was the trauma patient (female) who got pan scanned because she was altered. I saw a cube of gas and debris in her v****a which did not look like a tampon normally would. After some thinking I figured it was either some d***s she was trying to hide or potentially some weird foreign body. I advised the trauma team to investigate. They were not comfortable so they consulted the GYNs. They sent a first year resident who asked the patient if she had anything in her v****a. The patient denied anything. The GYNs reported back to trauma who reported back to me that she denied anything there. I advised a direct visual examination which occurred finally an hour later at which time they found nothing… To this day I have no doubt she had a leprechaun in there.
TLDR don’t send a first year resident to do uncomfortable things without explicit instructions.
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#57
Not a doctor BUT I work with people occasionally in a hospital for other reasons ( criminals )… anyhow…
One day I was sent to pick up a woman for transport to a different facility and she was being treated a host of different things.
She has complained of a lot of pain in the area where her colostomy bag was attached. I believe it’s called a stoma?? ( again, not a doctor )
Long story short, she has was diagnosed with a host of things wrong with the stoma and the doctors were all guessing how the hell she had gotten some of those complications.
She eventually admitted to me and the rest of the room that she was still engaging in her lifestyle of a prostitute and men would pay extra money to make sweet love to the hole where her colostomy bag attached.
TL:DR — for enough money you can make love to the hole in the side of someone’s abdomen. Just glove up so you don’t give her an STD there.
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#58
Why there was a water bottle, texta, and cucumber up their a*s.
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#59
This one happened just the other day. Had a patient come in looking pretty sick. Labs and vitals said the guy was in sepsis and most likely had a bad infection. The question was where…after some prodding and letting him know the seriousness of his situation he finally admitted to the source of his infection. He didn’t want to say it so he just pointed between his legs. Looking underneath his underwear revealed a smelly, red, swollen, pus draining s*****m. Some of it was even black and necrotic. Not a pleasant site and it looked horribly painful. He went on to explain that he had a painful lump on one of his testicles a few weeks back. He was told it was an infection and given antibiotics. The problem didn’t go away and by then he had decided to take matters into his own hands…literally. He tied a string tight around one testicle and proceeded to cut it out himself! Needless to say it became horribly infected and was going to require surgical intervention. Guy ended up doing ok.
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#60
A few years ago I had one kid, maybe 16 or 17, who evidently had heard of a challenge where you can fully insert a lightbulb into your mouth, but when you try to pull it out you can’t open your jaw wide enough and the bulb shatters inside.
Well after about three hours of picking glass from out of his mouth, (in every spot imaginable, gums, under the tongue, roof of the mouth, throat, etc) I asked what went down and he just would not admit that he put the lightbulb in his mouth. His main story was that his friend must have slipped it in his mouth when he was sleeping and punched him in the jaw, however upon talking to this friend in another room, he confessed that the boy had tried to beat the challenge, his friend even showed me videos of other people trying it.
So I go back in with the patient and bring his guardians in, in this case an aunt and uncle, and explained the whole lightbulb challenge without giving his friend up. When asked what I was talking about I explained and said there are many videos on the internet about the exact thing I’m talking about. They also revealed that he had tried several dangerous stunts and challenges before, but even still the stubborn b*****d wouldn’t admit a thing, he was adamant that he had absolutely no part in his injury and that everyone was out to get him.
It’s just crazy to me how arrogant and thick headed some people will get, they’ll do anything before admitting to doing something that stupid and short sighted.
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#61
Needed to do a d**g test on a patient, who came in with his pregnant girlfriend. Guy goes into the bathroom. A few minutes later he comes back out with an empty cup. He goes back to his room to drink some water. Couple minutes later he hurries back over to the bathroom with a noticeable bulge in his pants pocket.
He comes back out with an adequate sample. So, we run the test. It comes back negative. We then run a pregnancy test on the sample. That comes back positive.
Dude denied his pregnant girlfriend provided the sample even after being told there can possibly have prostate cancer if his urine turns positive on a pregnancy test. It was unbelievable.
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#62
I’m a medical assistant for a derm and patients will come in for a genital warts follow up, so I introduce myself and ask how the genital warts are doing.
“I don’t have genital warts! The doc just froze some moles in my groin but they haven’t gone away yet”
Dude, you got genital warts. Cut the b******t.
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#63
Had a woman on my obgyn rotation during med school that had pelvic inflammatory disease with bilateral abscesses around the fallopian tubes requiring drainage and IV antibiotics. The cause? Well she never admitted to it but we believe that she was repetitively using unwashed s*x toys to pleasure herself for weeks based on the culture that grew and her story not adding up.
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#64
Obligatory not a doctor. Used to work PR and Marketing in an inner-city hospital. Was once hanging out with the ER folks when a regular came in. He was in to self harm. This would have been in 2000/2001 or so and I was young, so I had never even heard of this. This guy had spent hours burying a Phillips head screwdriver in his abdomen – carefully working it around major organs. He was a Vietnam medic and had some training, so he could feasibly do it. He straight up said, “What screwdriver? You all are crazy ” The attending was staring right at the X-ray and the handle of the screwdriver sticking out of his abdomen. The screwdriver must have been 4 inches long. I still shudder!!
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#65
Not a doctor, but I have it on good authority that men will show up with light bulbs, terra cotta pots, or other objects like other commenters have mentioned, stuck in their r****m. (Just one, not all at once, lol.) How it got there? “I fell on it.” And the wife always nods along to the story.
Edited to reflect the fact that straight guys can enjoy a**l play too.
Image source: mr_pytr
#66
I once had a patient come in with large calluses on the front of his ankles, which is a very unusual place to get calluses. I brought it up a few times because I thought maybe he was wearing his shoe wear improperly, but he kept waving off the question.
Eventually I got him to admit that the calluses are there because he recently started taking a prescription anti-depressant medication which made it very difficult for him to achieve orgasm. He found that if he lay on his living room carpet With his legs bent out beneath him in a W fashion and jerked off for several hours he was able to achieve orgasm.
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#67
Patient came in with an irritated ostomy. Turned out to be an STI. She refused to admit she was using the hole for any sexual activity.
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#68
Real late here but I am a nurse and we just had a patient (mid50s male) strictly pooped in diapers. When asked why he said so he can freeze them. Ends up he has a deep freezer in the garage full of poopy diapers.
He also works for housekeeping in the hospital.
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#69
Not my story but a fellow coworkers story.
This 360lb woman came in (well, wheeled in as she was in a wheel chair since walking was so difficult due to her weight) complaining of severe stomach pain and itching.
They took her in and started examining and asking questions, as she’s talking about the area that’s in pain they lift up a heavy roll of fat and there were two twinkies squished in there all moldy and almost necrotic smelling, it was apparently there for nearly two months. Want to know what was inside those twinkies? Maggots. Hundreds of them.
All of her pain was caused by the maggots trying to burrow in her necrotic skin left untreated, we believe she put the Twinkie there so they would eat the Twinkie and not her necrotic tissue.
She denied that she put/left them there and “has never eaten a Twinkie in her life”. Kept going on and on about someone had stuffed them there while she was asleep.
(Apologies if this is not well written I am quite tipsy and on mobile).
Image source: GWNVKV
#70
Am a doctor of Dental medicine.
You all f*****g lie to me about flossing.
One guy who swore he didn’t know why he was losing his teeth because he was brushing twice a day caused me to get heated. I have him a mirror scrapped a chunk of plaque off his teeth from his gum line and showed him a big heaping pile of plaque proving that he was not brushing. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and told him I would show him how to brush and he turned it down because that “couldn’t possibly be it”
Some people just want dentures as fast as possible.
Image source: Dentaljds
#71
Not a doctor but work in a psych hospital. Walked into a patient’s bathroom at 3am, bc he was in there for a suspiciously long time, to find s**t smeared literally everywhere and he’s standing there butt a*s naked staring at me. He swears up and down he has no idea how it got there and he was just as surprised as I was. I just turned walked out called the violent code team to come hose him down and called the EVS team (environmental services) to come scrub and sanitize the bathroom. The entire time he’s still in full denial he did not do it even though they literally had to scrape s**t out of his fingernails and out of his eyebrows.
Called the oncall doctor who ordered him to be a full 1:1 observation from then on out so congrats buddy you now have to have someone watch you eat,sleep, and s**t for the next few weeks.
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#72
Not a doctor but as a patient i continually deny any feelings of depression, my GP was the one that actually took me to the hospital after I tried to k**l myself. But I still cant bring myself to tell him that I’m depressed.
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#73
My father is a doctor and once a patient had an eggplant in his a*s and he “just fell on top of it”.
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#74
I’m not a doctor. But as a patient, the woman doing my MRI asked what kind of music that I liked, and I was too embarrassed to tell her.
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#75
Volunteering as an RSO and medic during my local range club’s open weekend. D*****s rested the barrel of a 10-22 on the toe of his boot for a picture and shot himself in the foot.
Claimed it was a sniper.
I told him that the entry wound was straight through the top of his boot and asked him where shot came from.
“They must have a stealth chopper! We need to call the cops!”
“You were inside when it happened. I saw you do it.”
Fellas, don’t do bath salt.
Image source: xXxMassive-RetardxXx
#76
Had a patient on our service for a heart failure exacerbation. We weren’t sure why she had one now as she had been stable for a few years prior. She also had a documented past use of crack c*****e, so we checked a urine d**g screen.
The screen was positive and the next day I rounded on her, she asked me why she had the exacerbation. I told her it was likely due to the her c*****e use. She was SHOCKED that I would accuse her of using. I brought up her positive d**g test and she insisted it was a false positive and told me she must have picked up the false positive from a toilet seat…
That’s not how any of this works….
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#77
When I was a medical student, we had a patient on one of my rotations that was getting oral pain meds but insisting that we switch them to a stronger IV pain medicine because they had been getting nauseous and vomiting up all their meds.
When our team rounded on the patient to check on them, we walked into the room and were quickly greeted by an eager patient that had been waiting to show us their vomit bag. Turns out that it was filled with a lovely mixture of p**s and s**t and topped off with a handful of pills the patient had thrown in there to make it look like they couldn’t keep the meds down.
When we called them out, the patient was in total denial and tried to reason with us that it must be vomit since it’s in the vomit bag.
Image source: swags789
#78
Patient refusing to admit he is continuing to drink too water despite being on fluid restriction for congestive heart failure. He would take a rag, soak up a bunch of water, put it on his forehead as if to cool down, and then squeeze the water out so it would run down his face and into his mouth. “Doc, I just don’t understand why my weight won’t go down…” (This is water weight we were monitoring, not “fat” weight. In a heart failure patient, you try to find a weight at which his/her heart function is optimized, and then aim for this weight, which over the short term of a couple days, is largely reflective of the amount of fluid/water in the patient). Very odd – we wondered if it was almost subconscious.
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#79
My sister talks about this couple where the guy keeps getting peehole damage from sticking like aux cords and such in there
They were super honest about it I guess.
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#80
It’s amazing how many patients receive Narcan, but have NEVER used opiates. (Narcan only reverses opiates, no other class of medications.) They come in with shallow, infrequent respirations, pinpoint pupils, and sometimes needles and h****n or pills in their pockets. We Narcan them, they wake up, then deny everything. Denial is also a hell of a d**g.
The d***s in their pockets are never theirs. Sometimes, they’re not even their pants. They walked outside pantless, found a pair of pants in their size, never checked the pockets, ended up *not* using opiates, received Narcan, and those pants somehow happened to have h****n in them. Amazing.
Also had someone walk in with a bullet in their butt adamantly deny there was a bullet in their butt and they weren’t shot.
Image source: savasanaom
#81
Not a doctor, but this happened to my friend.
My friend was in a really awful car accident. She was hit head-on by a huge pick-up truck that was going 83 mph in a 40 mph zone. The driver had passed out at the wheel. When police arrived at the scene, my friend had a punctured lung and several broken ribs. The other driver was unscathed and still passed out at the wheel.
The police found open alcohol containers, marijuana, and other illegal substances in his vehicle.
He didn’t wake up until the ambulance had already arrived that the hospital and he was inside. The doctors (who had been informed that he was under the influence) asked him if he remembered anything. He told them “I have low blood sugar. I must have passed out.”
And then they did a d**g test and found he had been using EVERYTHING they found in his car.
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#82
FNP here, had a first job out of school doing Medicaid risk assessment for insurance companies.
I basically had to do complete family/social extensive reviews and complete PE and head-to-toe AND make any new preliminary dx and referrals for the insurance company in 60 minutes…very taxing but it definitely helped me hone down my skills in getting information from patients quickly and efficiently and especially with my charting, but that’s a different issue.
I have this one patient, and doing my thing getting their family history, etc, and get to d***s and alcohol use, normally pretty good disclosure about obvious things, especially if they are being treated for things like alcoholism etc. I get to smoking history and expect to hear 20 PPD for 15 years given the smell in the house and the opened blunt on the table that was pretty clearly going to be rolled before I arrived. Deadass woman with a 10 month old on her lap looks me in the eye and says no to any and all smoking history.
I stop and look at her in the eye and say are you absolutely sure? What’s this? *points to cigar blunt opened*
Yea that’s not mine.
You live with a S.O. at all or roommates?
No.
Oh ok.
I had gone over my self-imposed time limit on that charting section so I just wrote down ‘no’ in the chart and had her dx and referred for tobacco and d**g a***e. I wasn’t about to argue with a woman who couldn’t admit an issue so clearly right in both our faces.
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#83
When I used to work in a navy ER we had a woman who came in complaining of abdominal pain. She’d only speak to the nurse, and I soon wheeled her over to radiology to get films of an “obstruction”. No one was given any information beyond that.
I soon found out why. The rad tech took a couple of shots and we saw it. She’d lost a phallic-shaped object up there (PSA: when partaking in a**l play, use toys with either a bigger base than the toy or some other type of retrieval method.) She tried a few shots, but couldn’t get a really good image of it. Finally, after the third shot the rad tech stomped into the room and said “it’s still on, isn’t it?” (It was 3 am. The tech had worked all day and was woken up to take the films. Was it Ted’s mom who said nothing good ever happens after two am?) The patient sat up as straight as she could, held her head high, and said “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” How I finished that shift without passing out laughing, I’ll never know.
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#84
A teacher once told me a story about a lady who brought her young child into the emergency department complaining that the child was “sick” from eating ants . The doctors struggled to see how that would make her sick . It wasn’t until after some time and the child beginning to get very sick that the mum said she gave her own child ant poison to k**l the ants she ate. Then told the doctors it must be the ants and not the poison.
I cant find a link or source but i remember my teacher telling me this story.
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#85
Not a doctor, family member is a psychiatrist. Told me that patients won’t ask for a new doctor/psychiatrist even if they hate them. I mean, come on, this is about you. The doctors probably deal with worse s**t a dozen times a day and you asking for a switch isn’t going to make their day that much worse (maybe even better). Just tell the absolute truth.
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#86
Massage therapist here. During an intake, I always ask, “Any medications, surgeries, or medical conditions?” Even when they have a full detailed paper intake, I always ask this question verbally as well.
It’s amazing what people won’t tell me, but this one guy stood out… I get to his lower back and theres a f*****g medical device on the table, scared the c**p of me, I just was not expecting to bump into something. I asked him what it was, “Oh that’s my insulin pump, it doesn’t matter.” Not only did you not tell me you have diabetes, which absolutely matters, but you have a pump attached to your body and on my table?! I 100% needed to know that! I’m touching your whole body, yes I need to know if things are inserted into it! F**k me.
Mostly people forget to mention that they’ve torn their hamstring 5 times as I’m in the middle of stretching it, things like that which are honest mistakes, not hiding it.
Or when they say “Nothing you need to know.” My response is always “Try me.” I get why you think your ankle surgery 10 years ago doesn’t affect the massage, but it’s so important I know so I dont traction your leg or scrub hardware under your skin. I need to know everything. Even if you just had two ibuprofen this morning.
Oh and this guy with a scar in his chest. I asked what it was from. “Oh a heart surgery a year ago.” I about died. I’m working directly on your circulation, dear God.
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#87
That they were eating live bugs as a tasty treat.
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#88
Please tell me the doctor of the guy who did the tifu about eating live bugs all his life is on here, it’s all I need right now.
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