Image: Doctor Green by Gualda Trazos
Most people have had a bad doctor experience at one point or another, but it's one thing to have a doctor who doesn't know everything about your condition and another thing to have a doctor totally misdiagnose a common condition that puts your life at risk. Over on the Neatorama Facebook, we recently asked our readers what their worst experiences with doctors were and some of the answers were truly shocking. A few highlights:
I had 4 doctors tell me that I just needed to suck up my menstrual cramps and stop being such a baby. One finally listened and said "how do you even walk? You have the worst cases of endometriosis and adenomyosis I've ever seen. Your uterus is 6 times larger than the average healthy uterus. We can take it out for you".
Or:
Told I had an extra vertebrae in my back..took the x-ray to another doctor and a 4 inch bone tumor was clearly visible!
Another bad one:
I came to him crying because I was dealing with chronic pain from endometriosis and PCOS. He suggested that I "just get pregnant". Clearly he didn't realize getting pregnant with both of those things was damn near impossible. And he was an OB/GYN.
And then there was this one:
I had a doctor refuse to give me a repeat prescription for my asthma medication because they insisted I could cure it by only eating soup. Not even any specific type of soup, just "soup".
Check out all the horrible answers here and feel free to share more of your own stories in the comments.
In retrospect, a pregnancy test is cheap, and probably a good idea to have on hand for anyone who has risk factors (even for those with low fertility or on birth control... which don't 100% prevent a pregnancy, and seems to contribute to some of the delayed diagnosis stories I've heard).
A couple days later, her family doctor did a couple quick tests, including a pregnancy test that came back positive. Considering risks based on personal and family history, her family doctor pulled strings to get an ultrasound quickly and to get a specialist to answer some questions. It turned out to be an ectopic pregnancy, and my wife was sent to the hospital for emergency surgery. A specialist said that if my wife waited any longer, there could have been fatal complications. As the pain actually subsided after the first doctor visit, if my wife trusted his diagnosis she would have gone to the hospital much later. At the very least, if the first doctor stuck around a couple minutes longer to let my wife ask her short list of questions she wrote down, the list included, "Is there a chance this is an ectopic pregnancy and what should I look out for in that case?"