Doctors, What Happened When Patients Tried To Treat Themselves? (r/AskReddit)

doctors overdid it how often do you see patients after they have tried to self-medicate what's the worst mistake you've seen I was working in a clinic when a man a man came in with his blind wife she is diabetic and during my questioning I found out she had had a few episodes of low blood sugar in the past few months and I mean low has an unable to ingest food to raise her blood sugar the husband told me he had to inject his wife to bring her around usually in these cases you would inject glucagon which is basically the opposite of insulin it raises blood sugar he proceeds to tell me that the glucagon is too expensive so he has been dissolving sugar in water drawing it up and injecting it into her thigh I tried to hide my shock but it must have been obvious he just looked at me and said well it works didn't it I tried telling him all of the reasons he should use glucagon and not sugar water but he wouldn't have it I even told him that the pain of the injection is probably what woke his wife up not any increase in blood sugar he said the glucagon was too expensive I called around to a bunch of pharmacies and founded for $20 for two injections but he still refused to buy it we ended up calling Adult Protective Services good job I am very glad you called Adult Protective Services lady in her mid-60s comes in with a terrible burn on her hairline and scalp I asked what happened and she said she was coloring her hair with the leftover dye from a month or so ago needless to say she had a third-degree chemical burn all over her scalp okay that's problem one we ask her if she has any allergies because we want to give prophylactic antibiotics she says no we ask about her daily meds she rattles off a bunch including 1000 milligrams of amoxicillin augmentin we ask how long she's been taking the augmentin she replies two years every day for two years she's been taking massive doses of antibiotics her reasoning to keep myself from getting sick we went hunting for side effects found oral and vaginal thrush massive yeast infection in her colon malnutrition stomach ulcers and multiple open sores on her feet and knees she got a super infection on the burn site a few days later no fun when I was about 16 I started having these little red irritated spots show up on my arm my mom was immediately like you have psoriasis is all just go tanning so I tan for about a week and they just got worse but now I had them all over my body I had spots on my eyelids even so I go to the doctor finally turns out how he had ringworm and by tanning I was basically rubbing them all over with the lotions and incubating while I turned thanks mom I posted in a thread above this about how I got ringworm from a tanning bed i T was you pathologist I've seen a few cases of patients who basically wrecked their livers through use of some sort of herbal remedy like for weight loss or something similar be careful with unregulated dietary supplements is what I'm saying we got given a case in a lecture of a man who had a rash on his foot googled it and decided it was X and all some similar inflammatory disease so ordered and applied a steroid cream but for those who don't know these kind of steroids act by dampening the immune system the overactivity of which is the cause of diseases like eczema and psoriasis however he in fact had a fungal infection and had was just reducing his body's ability to fight it off if I remember correctly by the time he got to the doctors he needed it amputated I have a weird rash that I can diagnose on Google this just convinced me to schedule a doctor's appointment pharmacist here patient came in and wanted to self-medicate his cats pinky he wanted to know what the vet would prescribe and if it was available somehow over the counter after eluding and trying discussion he is insistent on putting generic neosporin in his cat's eye I repeatedly instructed him that it wasn't safe due to sterility reasons and that it could harm the cat worsen the cat's condition or caused some other problem for the animal his reply to me well I'll try it in my own eye first and see and just like that as mysteriously as he arrived he was gone a doctor first one that comes to mind although probably not the worst was a woman who came in with worsening back pain she had fallen the previous day and filled a gallon sized bag with ice and placed it on her back but she fell asleep with it on her back and a few hours later she noticed that her back hurt even worse if so she took another bag of ice and put it on and once again fell asleep when I examined her she had two large areas of burns with blisters on her upper back each about 6 inches in diameter when I took a picture and showed it to her no I will not post the picture her eyes welled up with tears she couldn't believe that ice had given her a second-degree burn lesson 15-20 minutes at a time every two three hours maximum for heat or ice packs in an EMT my crew responded to a fall victim in her house last winter she had been found on her kitchen floor by a neighbor checking in on her I was patient contact and as I bent down to assess the injury I noticed the woman had tightly tied a plastic bag with some washcloths around her foot I started cutting the bag open and saw that it was completely full of blood long story short the woman had fallen on her front steps 11 hours earlier and had crawled inside and tied herself a torniquet around her injury which was a gruesome compound ankle dislocation with a portion of the bone sticking out from her flesh which was starting to turn a foul color with the amount of time that hadn't passed since the injury she wasn't that old it was apparently a little senile and didn't want to call 9-1-1 or her daughter and cause anybody trouble on the right of the hospital her vitals were down and she had no pulse in the affected foot even the trauma nurses were a little shocked by how bad it looked I think she was pretty mobile despite the fall her house phone was in the same room as her and she had a cell phone in her purse she just thought it would be better to tie her own torniquet and totally cut off her own circulation and to call for help that just makes me sad poor dear I work in a dental office most common thing we see is people placing an aspirin on their gums next to an aching tooth all that does is severely burn the gums and makes the pain worse I've also met a few people over the years who have taken their own teeth out with a pair of pliers one guy we saw had a problem tooth when to pull it out pulled the wrong one then tried again and pulled the problem one he shattered the alveolar bone in that area and had to be sent to an oral surgeon immediately resident physician here I've had numerous patients who've rejected medical treatment for a small localized and easily treatable cancer in favor of nature Apothic homeopathic remedies inevitably they Rea present years later with diffusely metastatic cancer in their brains liver burns it's everywhere by that point the conversation shifts from how I can cure them to how I can make them comfortable before they die for example woman has progesterone receptor positive breast cancer this means that the hormone progesterone will make her cancer grow faster she goes to her naturopath who prescribes her tubs of progesterone cream for yours which most certainly made her cancer worse but it's okay she tells me it was years of natural progesterone nurse here at a get-together with friends where the one in drinking got out of hand I had a friend burn himself on the oven while making pizza then try to cauterize that wound with his lighter I'm an EMT one of my first calls was an 80 plus year-old man living in an assisted living facility he had bought at least 150 bottles of some naturally lose weight quick pills that he saw late-night on TV he had been taking an excess amount of them for at least two days straight we got there and his mental status was clearly altered didn't know where he was etc I wish I still had the picture of the stacks of cartons he had in his small room I still wonder how he got them inside of the facility med student here literally all the time I've seen super overdosing OTC meds guy with bloody stool and abdominal pain who we found out used for goodie powder packets a day for over five years patient who had someone try to nail file his hemorrhoids not sure how he thought that would help massive infections from people literally stapling a wound shut with an office stapler I had a patient who came in saying that she had a sore throat so she took her cats expired antibiotics and wanted to know why she wasn't getting better well done they've expired geez talk about stupid physician here the one that stands out from among the rest of the field life-threatening problems with OTC acetaminophen ibuprofen naproxen happen all the day long happened many years ago while I was a medical student I was serving my rural medicine rotation at a primary care practice in the sticks a man came in for an urgent appointment for a rash I went to see him first to get working on the history in the exam room I met a very nice young fit man sitting bolt upright on the exam table looking very uncomfortable during the history it was revealed that he was a telephone line repairman and was working in late summer out on the telephone lines around the county climbing them to reach the wires he had been exposed to poison ivy this way over both thumbs and much of his torso which had happened before however this time the rash was worsening with time I asked him to remove his dark colored shirt and after he did I almost fainted he had open wounds all over his arms and chest all of the blisters from the poison ivy had on roofs and the tissue underneath was destroyed everything was bright red bleeding and weeping it looked intensely painful I'm having a hard time describing it it was the worst skin findings I'd ever seen I thought for sure this was stevens-johnson syndrome or ten so I started asking about medication use he told me he takes no medications at home but that his grandmother gave him a gallon of solution to put on the rash which he had been using regularly since the poison ivy began he didn't know what was in it we called grandma what was in it was bleach he got to go for a fun trip to the Burn Center poor guy heard the story but didn't see the patient a woman in her sixties presented to the ER with episodes of passing out during sex she underwent a full workup cardiac neurological when she was admitted and no cause was found so she was discharged she returned again with the same complaint a few days later and divulged that this had actually happened during sex both times upon further questioning it turns out that her husband had been using topical nitroglycerin paste on his penis for erectile dysfunction when they had sex the medicine was absorbed into her bloodstream causing her blood pressure to drop precipitously her husband was advised to discontinue this practice people with tooth pains trying some miracle remedy and when the pain stops they think they are healed what they don't know is that it means their nerves have been infected in fact so serious that the nerves died and rotting below the gums only until the pain starts again and their so-called remedy doesn't work do they go to the dentist by then there is no choice to but to remove the teeth and probably some additional surgery too bTW dentists poke sharp objects at your gums for a reason it's to check for periodontal disease most dentists also don't fool with making payment arrangements this means people with no money get no dental care given the risk that I've heard comes with untreated abscess I find it really concerning that dental insurance is not mandated by the Acker I did an MRI on a patient who had treated her breast cancer with sodium bicarbonate the patient presented to den with numbs hands and neck pain the MRI showed extensive bony metastasis and a pathogen fracture of c2 basically the cancer had spread all through her body and had weakened her bones to the point that they were disintegrating putting her a risk of damaging her spinal cord or worse it's more just sad that people want to believe that these simple remedies can treat complex issues as opposed to modern medicine I'm a medical student I have two that stand out first we had a guy come in to the free clinic complaining of knee pain he is a larger guy an ex-football player who developed a bit of a gut after he stopped playing he said that he has some old injuries torned meniscus chronic arthritis etc he used to go to his doctor in another state who would drain the knee and give him a steroid injection every so often when he lost his job he lost his insurance too hence being seen at the free clinic before he decided to come to us though he decided it was a good idea to take a needle and try to drain his knee himself four times on physical exam the knee is massively swollen tender bright red classic signs of a septic joint we weren't equipped to treat it in the free clinic so we strongly encouraged him to go to the air but he didn't want to go because of his insurance situation we tried to explain the gravity of the situation to him but he refused to listen without prompt treatment he could end up losing his leg we offered to call him an ambulance to take him to the ER but he refused and left the clinic never did find out what happened to him second this one I heard secondhand from a classmate we had a firefighter coming with some burns on his leg I believe they were incurred from a drunken cooking accident rather than any on-the-job heroics but I could be mistaken anyway the burns were serious but he was expected to make a full recovery quickly enough he was discharged and instructed to eat a lot of protein to help him recover he interpreted this as get as much protein into your body as possible by any means necessary he goes home takes some protein powder and mixes it up with water and sets it up in an IV needless to say he developed a pretty serious bloodstream infection it prevented his burn from healing correctly and he ended up needing a partial amputation of his foot he eventually recovered but it took way longer and there were so many unnecessary complications not me but my friend found out a couple of months ago that she's cousins with her best friend hashtag feature me

Channel: Updoot Everything

Views: 333,530

Rating: 4.8827162 out of 5

Keywords: #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, r/, \r, r\, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny reddit stories, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, reddit stories 2019, people of reddit, sub, reddit cringe, memes, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, story, stories, TZ reddit, rslash, comedy, fresh, self-medicate, doctors, doctor, nurse, nurses, hospital, medicine, health

Id: O9VFLohN4NA

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 31 2019