Doctors of reddit, what's the most incorrect patient self diagnosis you've seen?
This comment was posted to reddit on Sep 14, 2017 at 2:12 am and was deleted within 10 hour(s) and 40 minutes.
Doctors of reddit, what's the most incorrect patient self diagnosis you've seen?
Standard "Not A Doctor" Disclaimer...
Laundry list of shit my dad has dealt with:
Broken foot that was misdiagnosed for 3 weeks. At this point, he had been a Type 2 Diabetic for like 12 years. He broke it by slipping a bit and hitting the floor a little hard with his foot while getting off the treadmill. Nobody thought to x-ray his foot over a sudden onset of pain even though he's a fucking diabetic.
Gall bladder that was inflated like 3-4x normal size. Just a little heartburn, said the doctors! For 3 years!
Heart attack. He presents heart attack symptoms more typical of a woman, in that he doesn't get the stereotypical numb left arm with sudden crippling pain and it acts more like he has a flu or cold with severe fatigue and overall soreness.
First clinic completely failed the diagnosis. ENTIRELY. Their choice was to send him home with antibiotics and to check back in 4 weeks. Wasn't getting better after 10 days, so parents went to the large hospital in the next town over and they went into sudden horrible panic mode realizing that he was on his second week of a fucking heart attack. One ambulance later (which actually passed me on the road as I was coincidentally taking the same route to get my tires changed) and he's in the dedicated cardiac center of the largest hospital in the state.
If the dipshits in the first clinic hadn't fucked the diagnosis (this was over Thanksgiving weekend, so it was the C-grade crew and they were phoning it in, naturally), he would have had far, far less damage than he ended up with. He's doing as well as can be expected at this point but fuck's sake. If the fucks in the first place had done even ONE test beyond a lazy visual assessment of symptoms, they would have caught it.