Doctors, What's Something you had to Explain that you thought was COMMON KNOWLEDGE? - Reddit Podcast

doctors have read it what's something you've had to tell a patient that you thought for sure was common knowledge have had to inform a few male patients that the condom only goes on the shaft and should not be pulled down to include covering of the testicles how a shorter slash fatter five milliliter oral syringe held more volume than a skinnier and longer one milliliter oral syringe how does this hold more liquid when it's shorter also I've seen almost every incorrect way to use an inhaler upside down being fairly common people taking birth control pills only on the days they have intimacy I no longer assume anything is common knowledge I'd rather have someone be offended that I explain something basic than to have something awful happen because I assume the patient knew something after putting a few stitches in a middle-aged guy scalp the family asked if he was okay the attending joked that his brain was still inside the family were stunned by this news I the medical student spent the next half hour informing the family that the brain was inside the skull and that a person couldn't live without one they thought that the brain was just to turn a phrase to reflect a person's Common Sense rather than an actual organ sort of the same as what they thought about the heart I'm not a doctor but I'm an ER nurse I had a patient come in for an STD check she was very upset and continued to tell me that she only had one partner progressing through my assessment she further divulged that even if he was sleeping with other people it shouldn't matter because he uses a condom every time and he makes sure to wash it thoroughly after every use I asked what she meant when she said he watches it after every use she explained that he watched the condom with hot water and soap before he used said condom again I had to explain to her that condoms are a one-time use product she had no clue my dad is a family doctor in the states a woman came in for a well-baby check with her six-month-old and she had what looked like chocolate milk in the baby's bottle so he started explaining to her as kindly as he could that she shouldn't be giving her baby chocolate milk at which point she interrupts him and says oh that isn't chocolate milk it's coffee he just loves it if you're going to put it in your butt make sure it has a flared base or as attached to something you won't lose your grip on corollary if you've already lost something in your butt don't lie to the triage nurse and then medical team while your story is usually amusing we don't really care how it ended up in there pediatric nurse here I've told more than one parent that their infant should not be drinking Dr Pepper out of their bottle or any other vessel for that matter Viagra does not prevent STDs or pregnancy not a doctor but a paramedic during clinical time in the ER 17 year old came in with the bloody rectum anus apparently she wasn't wiping after using the bathroom and it was basically really bad diaper rash so the nurse had to call social services and explain to this girl proper wiping I'm a veterinary technician I once had to explain to a client that the ticks she had been frantically trying to remove from her male dog's belly with tweezers were actually his nipples I also told her she had an extremely well-behaved patient dog not a doctor RN in the ICU I've seen some really stupid people over the years but a few weeks ago a patient's family member got into a verbal altercation with me over the fact that I was trying to freeze his mother to death he kept pointing to the digital thermostat displaying a temperature of 23 degrees Celsius we're in the U.S by the way when I gently explained to him that 23 degrees Celsius is not at all cold he just got pointed to the display and shouting you don't think 23 degrees is cold it's 23 freaking degrees in here and acting insane after multiple attempts to explain to him what Celsius is by myself the charge nurse house supervisor and security we finally gave up and had him escorted out he was a man in at least his late 30s who's graduated high school and had never heard of Celsius and Fahrenheit he literally thought we were making it up in an attempt to conceal my efforts to freeze is intubated critically ill mother to death slightly graphic warning another vet here dead bodies decompose if you leave your dead dog eye euthanized in the back of your car on the hottest day of the year don't come cry to me when it's a belly fills with putrefying gases and bursts demanding I cover the cost of reupholstering your car might be considered a little rude as well a hospital has opened 24 hours a day seven days a week for medical emergencies so the next time you have a stroke on Friday come in on Friday and don't wait for the weekend to pass a child cannot have inherited any genetic traits from someone the mother has previously been with only one man is the biological father my wife and I were trying to get pregnant and due to possible complications we were talking to an obstetrician towards the end of the visit he tells us in all seriousness just so you guys know you have to stop using condoms if you want to get pregnant we just stared at him a bit and say uh obviously and he just shakes his head and says you'd be surprised there's been a few couples that really didn't realize that my grandmother was the ignorant one getting and explaining she was 18 and in labor with the first child she was the kind of lady to wear pants in the late 40s the nurse looked her up and down and told her to put on the labor clothes so she took off her top and bra and got on the bed the nurse is really confused take off your pants too why it comes out my belly button right ask Grandma no darling it comes out the way he came in ER nurse here had to explain to a 27 year old female that this bleeding she was having for a week every month was normal and why she had two children by the way my mother is a nurse and has been for over 25 years the only story of hers that makes me sick is the story of a man who could not afford Viagra so he reasoned his [ __ ] gun should do the trick right it'd stay in there and keep him ready so he put the tip of the gun in his urethra and filled himself up long story short don't do that don't for Christ's sake ever do anything even remotely like that podiatrist buddy told me this one lady has to have foot amputated and is given waiver forms to sign pre-op but he asks if she needs time to think about it she's very nonchalant and doesn't seem to care much what they do he gets suspicious and probes a bit as to why she's not more concerned she says she gets that they have to operate and it's okay because the foot will grow back he then has to explain she's not a salamander things get a bit more serious okay but like salamanders are cool imagine if we could regrow her limbs like salmon Manders they'll be sick not a doctor but a nutritionist I work with a lot of different patients and I have tons of stories about food stupidity had a lady have bariatric surgery your stomach gets surgically stapled smaller and a mother kept trying to force her to eat real food the day of the surgery when she was on a liquid diet she would eat it puke rip her stitches out repeat we had to ban the mother from seeing her because she would literally blackmail and guilt-trip this poor lady into eating a whole pizza barf it all up because her poor post-surgery stomach couldn't handle it and end up ripping out stitches and causing enormous pain because her mother was positive that she would die if she was on a liquid diet for a couple days another lady I was seeing for clinicals was diabetic and she would come in every week with stupid high blood sugar levels 250 to 260 ish not knowing why they were so high she kept a record of everything she ate and all of her food intake seemed fine one day her husband came with her which was weird and he ninja slipped me a note while shaking my hand it read ask her about the Quick Trip slushies she doesn't believe me that they have sugar in them so I asked her if she she was having any soda lemonade tea ice cream shakes or slushies and she told me like a light bulb had gone off in her head well I have been drinking about three of the 48 ounce Quick Trip slushies every day for a while now they're just so good and they aren't food or drink they're slushies so they don't have any sugar in them and I don't need to record them it was so hard to convince her that those are so full of sugar it isn't even funny but seriously three a day on a type 2 diabetic it was one of the stupidest things I've ever heard in my life a nursing home called 911 for a patient who was having difficulty breathing when we arrived a PA was standing in front of the patient vigorously Fanning the old lady with their hands she looked at us and said I'm giving her some oxygen because we couldn't find a portable O2 tank and keeps flapping her arms remember this is a physician assistant probably making a hundred thousand a year I informed her that she could stop now and my partner and I did her best to wait until we were outside to burst out laughing going off on a side tangent here some people don't handle stress as well I volunteer as an emergency first responder but one of the funniest cases I've seen of was out of uniform in an airport a larger gentleman who suffered from COPD had taken a six-hour flight upon getting through security he had collapsed and was having difficulty breathing the first person on scene to help the guy was a firefighter I was second on scene younger and smaller than the firefighter I'm 6'3 and not skinny this guy was just huge so I'm letting him take lead as I run through making sure EMS is on the way checking this guy's vitals stabilizing his head and neck big guy went from conscious to unconscious quickly and fell straight down and getting a history from his family in the meantime the firefighters kind of starting to panic a little he may have been new or just the fact that he was out of uniform and not expecting it through him either way as the man regains Consciousness and I start running through a quick GCS test which involves me and the gentleman talking to each other and treating for shock the firefighter tries to retake the guy's vitals he fails to find a pulse understand at this point I am communicating with the patient he's not completely Lucid but he is speaking to me and groaning having failed to find a pulse the firefighter assumes this gentleman is in full on cardiac arrest and begins to attempt to apply an AED to his chest I say attempt because along with being large this gentleman was somewhat hairy now in any First Aid course for anyone that involves teaching one to use an AED one of the first things you cover is that the razor in the kit is there in case you need to shave someone the firefighter having failed to realize that talking probably means the patient isn't in cardiac arrest and that he is having trouble getting a pulse because the patient is larger then fails to shave the guy's chest this leaves the patient with the two contact pads hanging off of his chest hair but very much not in any way contacting his skin while I've just started to realize what the firefighter was trying to do at that point fortunately an older woman arrives and identifies herself as a Trauma Nurse who are by the way just about the best people to have on your side if something like this happens she tells him to go talk to the family takes lead and everything goes smoothly from then until the airport medical folks show up and take over unfortunately I'm having trouble not laughing the whole time at the image of the firefighter stare intently at an AED that can't possibly give him a reading on the condition of the now conscious and Lucid patient tldr even people who should know better sometimes lose it under stress had a lady measure her baby's temperature by preheating the oven and putting one hand in front of it while the other hand was on the baby's forehead she told the nurse her baby's fever was about 250 degrees lady you either think you're the Human Torch or you don't understand how conduction works I had an old lady come in with a massive bleed in her brain she was pretty much gone I had to explain to her tearful son that there was nothing we could do he said that he loved his mama and he'd give anything for her so he asked us to give her his brain for a brain transplant I actually was left speechless for a minute and then had to spend another 20 minutes explaining why that was not possible mom brought her kids to the ER after they ate all of their Halloween candy because they had tummy aches they were still eating Reese's peanut butter cups when they were in the exam room I had to explain to her that they need to cut back on the candy and she looked at me like I had three heads for almost a month my friend had random pains bruises started showing up randomly he looked Ashen and what we first thought was him being lazy was actually him not having any energy finally his girlfriend got him to agree to go to the doctor who sent him to the ER where it took several doctors to figure out what was wrong either because none of them had actually seen it in real life or they didn't think someone could be that stupid quote the doctor you have scurvy eat a freaking orange oh I've got another one inhaler technique so we're told to always show a patient how to take an inhaler if they are new to them and that we should check technique every so often yeah yeah you'd think how hard can it be well my senior once noticed that a patient was getting repeat prescriptions for an inhaler every week rather than every month we brought her in to find out why oh it just doesn't seem to work very well I pressed it up to 50 times and it doesn't help we were in shock over this salbutamol inhalers taken in excess we're talking like 10 pops taken in an asthma attack can give you a thumping headache a trimmer and a dry mouth how is she taking 50 and not noticing we asked to see the 10 technique yeah turns out she was spraying it onto her chest internal face Palms were had and we educated her on how to take it properly a PhD isn't that kind of doctor please don't show me that rash during paramedic school my teacher was a PA who told us the story of a lady that came into the clinic he was working at she said she didn't feel well nothing but General fatigue and not feeling right he had the nurse do a standard set of vitals and a blood glucose her glucose was extremely high so he goes in to talk to her he asked has anyone ever told you that you have diabetes she replied yeah a doctor said that I had that once and I took some medication for a couple weeks and felt better he then had to explain to her that diabetes doesn't go away after some medication I had the opposite happened to my wife she was pregnant and had a thyroid nodule we were concerned about how removal could affect the pregnancy due to changes in hormone levels and anesthetic during the surgery we stated this concern quite clearly and in great detail his response was that he will be operating on the neck and that it was nowhere near the baby thanks for answering a question we never had and ignoring hours he was really pushing for surgery before delivery we did not see him again I work in a hospital lab quite a few years ago there was a patient who was on her schedule for a semen analysis from one of our fertility doctors the between the lines here is the patient was having some fertility problems patient presents us with a cup of urine we explained that we need a semen sample not a year and one confused why his first sample was rejected he goes back to the private bathroom at the end of the hall about half an hour later he comes back with another urine sample and that's when I literally had to have both a birds and bees talk with a man in his mid-30s and clue him in on the world of self-pleasure this has actually happened twice now in my eight years and I found out about another guy when I was talking to my manager about it the second time I had a few thoughts I could say these guys thousands of dollars by explaining how to have intimacy properly somehow it never came up in the office that the wrong fluid is being used I had to explain to a frantic mother that non-traumatic vaginal bleeding with abdominal cramps is normal in a 12 year old I tried to throw her a hint when I asked when the girl's last menstrual cycle was she merely replied in hysterics she doesn't have menstrual cycles she's only 12. I'll leave the diagnosis to your imagination I'm a CNA at a nursing home we got a new resident in and she had a huge bed sword near her tailbone region that had become infected and abscess to the point then you probably could have fit a Coke can inside the opening it had to be cleaned packed and have a wound pump attached to it every 12 hours turns out before she came to us her family didn't think she needed any at-home help so they would go over in the morning get her up bathe dressed put a Pop-Tart on the table for her get her in her wheelchair and go about their day she was incontinent and would sit in the chair for 12 to 15 hours a day covered in her own urine and feces until they came back wiped her off and put her back in her bed for the night sitting all day in your own filth it turns out leads to bed sores the day she was admitted to my facility her family my administrator and everyone were all talking in a room they had introduced us and let her know I'd be taking care of her at night from now on she whispered to me that she needed to go to the bathroom and I had to kick out my boss and her family because her son insisted that she can just hold it she was never able to get over the Raging infection in her wound and it eventually killed her it was one of those situations where I honestly wish I could have looked them in the face and told them you know you're the one that killed your mother right you killed her just as an update yes we tried to turn them in for elder abuse but she was actually still sound of mind and realized what we were going to do and so she recanted her story and said she had never told us anything like that she didn't want to see her son in jail for what he did to her so she went to her death telling people things had just gotten out of hand and she was too weak paramedic here have informed numerous people that pouring Gatorade into the unresponsive diabetic's mouth is not a good idea what you should do call an ambulance if they have a glucagon emergency kit follow its instructions do not put anything in on near or around their face I've heard the powdered sugar and gums etc etc but if you expect an ambulance within 20 minutes just lie them on their side and wait drink the Gatorade yourself you deserved it you just say their freaking life my mother who worked as a pediatric nurse she had a mother whose child was putting on a startling amount of weight this was bad since the patient's mother was obese and had diabetes and they wanted to control weight gain for baby so they went through the feeding schedule baby was due for a bottle during the checkup the mother whips out a bottle during appointment my mama startled to see the milk is bright pink she asks why is the milk bright pink the child's mother explains that her kid prefers the milk if it has Strawberry Quick mixed in and drinks more milk the mom didn't get the connection between quick and weight gain tldr don't feed your your child the beat us it makes them fat from the start I doc here just today I had to tell a patient that no you should not attempt to continue wearing a contact lens that was dropped in the toilet this is like a worse version of that eyeball licking trend from 2013 which actually turns out was a hoax in a free medical clinic I had to tell a mother that she should be brushing her four-year-old's teeth the daughter came because her throat hurt after opening her mouth and using a tongue depressor to see her throat the daughter squirmed like four-year-olds are prone to do and the tongue depressor hit her gums pus flowed everywhere and the child wound up having to be put on penicillin before having every last tooth pulled due to severe infection you should start brushing your infant's teeth as soon as they start teething and do a gentle gum massage with the baby toothbrush before that use safe to swallow toothpaste before the child is 10. let the child brush their own teeth as soon as they are able for practice and then have an adult brush them at a 45 degree angle toward the gums in small circles children should be supervised brushing their teeth until they're at least 12 or longer if necessary this occurred in Nicaragua quite far from any major city and wasn't reported because the mother did follow up and kept the appointment for extractions the thought of brushing her daughter's teeth simply never arose before modern toothbrushes were invented people used bones porcupine quills sticks and chew sticks the anxious Romans had toothbrushes as well yes you should brush your pet's teeth pet toothpaste only no fluoride no I didn't murder the mother she was provided with six months worth of dental supplies for both of them and thoroughly educated on dental hygiene alright now for the old Switcheroo my ex-mother-in-law was a pediatrician however her education was all from the 60s and 70s in Cold War Poland and she hadn't practiced as a pediatrician for 30 years when our doctor was born like a lot of first-time parents we read all the books and the vast consensus at the time was that the only thing babies need is mother's milk so we set ourselves up for that and the baby is thriving after a couple of weeks with their doctor telling us everything is fine mother-in-law comes to visit and of course we're doing everything wrong we can't hold the baby right we're being too attentive we're not being attentive enough she's too warm she's too cold I think you expect a certain amount of that but then she starts insisting on giving the baby sugared black tea in a bottle I'm not the smartest guy on the planet but I'm smart enough to let the wife and her mom settle this between them lots of screaming back and forth showed her the literature from our doctor about nursing all the references in the baby books pulled down a couple of recent research articles but the crazy old battle ax didn't give up finally I caught her after we foolishly left her alone with the baby for a couple of minutes trying to force her to take a bottle with tea in it she added my wife in a week I will go back home and then you can do whatever you want with the baby in a level voice I told her that's what you don't seem to understand we can do whatever we want with the baby right now RN not an MD but here's the story patient was a newly diagnosed diabetic who needed to be taught how to inject insulin so the diabetes educator did the good old routine of taking an orange drawing up insulin then injecting it into the orange that made the patient repeat it patient goes home comes back in a week and his blood sugar is out of control they ask him if he's been taking his insulin and he goes of course so they decide to ask him to demonstrate how he injects insulin the patient goes sure I just need an orange at this point I started face palming hard because I know where this one is heading but of course they got him an orange and a vial of insulin with the syringe so the guy draws out the insulin correctly takes the syringe injects it into the orange and then says and then I eat the orange at this point I had to walk out because I nearly lost myself right there I once had a patient with a cancer diagnosis completely depressed about not being able to see their family anymore I was confused because I had spoke with this individual spouse and extended family who seemed supportive there wasn't any indication of family problems it turns out this individual thought genetic and family history had meant something similar to contagious leading them to the conclusion that one should stay away from loved ones lest it be spread through the family that was one clarification I was so happy to give to those wondering how such a misunderstanding is possible keep in mind that we ought not to judge not everyone has the benefit of a good education nor is everyone part of a generation and culture that has always had medicine and Science in their lives other times language and jargon could be a barrier to understanding I was not the physician that failed to communicate the issues effectively but we were all glad that at least his problem could be easily dealt with

Channel: Am I the Genius?

Views: 447,104

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Id: 2YBznzFD6do

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 30 2022