23 Disturbing Things Doctors Said To Their Patients That Are Deeeeeply Infuriating
by Kayla Yandoli · BuzzFeedRecently Reddit user NoSpot5547 asked the community, "What’s the most unprofessional thing a doctor has ever said to you?"
Unfortunately, people had many stories to tell, ranging from unbelievable to horrific to disturbing. Like, these doctors should have their licenses revoked (I'm not exaggerating, folks).
So, here are some of the most unprofessional things doctors have ever said to their patients:
Note: Some submissions were pulled from this Reddit thread by user u/Silent-Zebra.
Note: Some submissions include topics of eating disorders, suicide, and mental illness. Please proceed with caution.
1. "My sister went to a gynecologist because she'd been having breakthrough bleeding for several months, plus really heavy periods. She was bleeding through a tampon and pad every couple of hours and had unbearable cramps that made it difficult for her to stand. Her abdomen was visibly swollen and firm like she was pregnant. She couldn't button her jeans anymore. The doctor didn't even touch her — they just told her that 'every woman hates having her period. Take an iron supplement and five or six advil for the pain.' She got a second opinion from another doctor, who immediately sent her to radiology. She had a grapefruit-sized fibroid tumor in her uterus and had to get a hysterectomy at 35."
2. "I went to a female OBGYN to get a birth control prescription and a checkup, and she found symptoms of trich. She said, with utter vitriol, 'We need to get this cleared up because I know what you're like, and if we don't treat it ASAP, you'll just spread it to dozens of innocent men.' I was barely 19, and only had one sexual partner at the time. Before 19, I had never had sex before. This was my second OBGYN visit and I was lost and terrified. I'm 36 now, and I still remember that exchange (and probably will for life because what the fuck, ma'am?)."
3. "I went to a dermatologist for hidradenitis suppurativa and wanted to discuss new skin issues related to the illness that had emerged on my breasts. I told her that my sweet husband didn't give a hoot, but it was really bothering me. She said, 'Well, there are treatment options, but the one person who really matters doesn't care. So, I'd say let's just leave it.' I never went back — I also never paid the bill for that appointment. No regrets."
4. "I switched doctors when COVID happened. I told the new doctor about my torn Achilles, and he flat-out told me I was lying. The old office sent my file, and he saw the ultrasound of my torn Achilles and changed his tune. I went back to him a couple more times due to a lack of doctors and any issues. He made me feel like I was lying."
"I also went to a therapist and he asked, 'How long have you been struggling with depression?' I told him since I was a teenager, and he straight-up said, 'No, you haven't.' I just walked out of his office."
5. "I tried to talk about the consistently awful and painful gastrointestinal problems I was having. My doctor held her finger in my face and said, 'anxiety' and refused any further action. Then she told me to lose weight because I was getting 'fat.' I went to another doctor who was appalled and said, "Yes, it could be caused by anxiety, but that doesn't mean you have to suffer. We should make sure nothing else is going on.' She did some tests, referred me to a gastroenterologist, and I was diagnosed with IBS. I was put on appropriate medication, and my quality of life dramatically improved. I think about that response sometimes — 'It could be caused by anxiety, but that doesn't mean you have to suffer.'"
6. "My psychologist had advised me to go to the ER for help if I ever attempted suicide, so one day, I did. The doctor on call sent out his assistant to talk to me. She told me to go for a walk next time instead of wasting hospital resources. I told her, in return, that if I went for a walk in that state of mind, I would likely jump off the highway overpass. I get that exercise is good for your mental health, but come on. I still don't know how that interaction SHOULD have gone, but that's certainly not the kind of 'help' I was expecting."
7. "They said, 'I'm happy to see you lost weight. I bet you'll even be able to get a boyfriend now because it probably would have been hard for you before. Just make sure you keep it off...you want boys to be attracted to you, right?' I was a 16-year-old girl with a boyfriend in the lobby. We had been together since before I lost weight (not that it mattered)."
8. "When I was 21, I dislocated my shoulder, and it continued to hurt for weeks. I went to a specialist, and he suggested the pain was all in my head. After an MRI, he realized I had a SLAP (superior labrum anterior and posterior) tear in my shoulder. So, I said, 'Looks like it's not all in my head.' He looked at me with such contempt — I never went back to that asshole."
9. "At eight years old, I got my period. Obviously concerned about how young I was, my mom took me to the doctor. The doctor said to my mom, 'Well, in some places, she’s now old enough to marry.' Then they said to me, 'Have a child now before you start chemo,' which I was due to start a day or so later."
10. "I'm sporty, but I couldn't do the sports I played any longer due to pain in my knees. The doctor looked at my MRI scans and said there was nothing. 'Women's knees sometimes hurt without a reason. It even has a name, called 'the knee pain of the young women.' He then proceeded to tell me I should do more sports because women's knees just hurt from doing nothing, fully ignoring that I came in for pain in my knees after/when doing sports. A year later, it got worse. Another doctor and another MRI later, I'm waiting for surgery as what was a little lesion before had turned into a larger, scarred lesion."
"And yet, this isn't nearly the worst thing a doctor has ever said or done to me. I know for a fact that I've repressed a lot of terrible shit over the years because I simply never wanted to think about it again.
It's kind of buried there like a large meal in my belly that I just can't puke up to recall."
11. "This happened to my mother. She was seeing the doctor about getting her tubes tied after giving birth to her third and final child. Holding said infant in her arms with a four-year-old me playing with my dolls in the corner, the doctor heard what she wanted. They looked at both myself and my baby sister and said, 'Well, what if one of your kids dies? You won't be able to have another.' BECAUSE DEAD CHILDREN ARE JUST REPLACEABLE LIKE THAT, I GUESS? 🤬🤬🤬."
12. "I went to my doctor because I had a sinus infection that burst a blood vessel under my skin. My doctor thought my husband had hit me. After the x-ray, he realized I was correct. Then he had other medical staff look at what he said was their 'freak of the week.'"
13. "'People don't get depressed at 13 — it's just her period.' Surprise: It was depression."
14. "In middle school, I was seeing a psychiatrist for generalized anxiety and a panic disorder. I had been struggling with my weight because I was too anxious to eat, and at one point, I was about 15 pounds underweight. I started taking antidepressants, and I gained weight once my anxiety started improving. One day, my psychiatrist brought me over to a scale so he could weigh me. He told me that I needed to watch what I was eating because I was 'starting to get fat.'"
"I was finally at the low end of a healthy weight after struggling for months and it was such a blow to my self-esteem after all the progress I had made. I broke out in tears as soon as he said that because it crushed me. My mom yelled at him, we walked out of his office, and never came back."
15. "My doctor told me, 'It's time for you to go back to your 'normal' life and push through the pain. There's nothing wrong with you.' I broke down crying. He told me I was being overly emotional and stressing myself out over nothing. I actually have an extremely rare genetic mutation that affects the extracellular matrix of my cells, resulting in improperly formed/functioning connective tissue throughout my entire body. I had developed fibromyalgia to boot, enhancing all of that pain to a point where I struggled to walk."
16. "I went to see my doctor about a pain I'd been feeling in my lower left abdomen for a couple of days. He asked me a few questions, waved his hand, and said, 'It's just a pulled muscle, don't worry about it. But, I am going to talk to you about that tattoo on your arm.' He proceeded to lecture me about the risks of tattoos and how unclean tattoo parlors are because they use the same needles over and over, the ink is synthetic, and I have plastic in my skin. He gave me all of this outdated information they used to scare people with in the '80s and '90s. I was 31, and he was talking down to me like I was a kid."
"Years went by, and it turns out the pain was diverticulitis and eventually ended up almost killing me. I'd recently had issues with my stomach and was under a gastroenterologist's care.
When he asked about my past intestinal problems, I told him what the old doctor told me. The new doctor shook his head and said, 'Pain in that area means two things: diverticulitis or cancer. You're very lucky it was diverticulitis.'"
17. "When I was 19, my primary care doctor, who was a man, told me he could do a pap smear for me at my physical. When I told him I already had a gynecologist, he said, 'I can do it professionally or personally.' Needless to say, I reported him and never saw him again."
18. "A doctor told me, 'Welp, looks like you're probably going to go blind!' While I have visions of myself walking about tapping a white cane in front of me, he blithely adds, 'But don't worry about it. Corneal transplants are 99% effective — you'll be fine.' I did have transplants later when my eyesight got bad enough to warrant it, and they worked a miracle."
19. "I was in the room when a doctor said to my husband, 'I’m not going to figure out what it is. If it was serious, you’d be dead by now.' We later found out that my husband’s uncle saw this same doctor before he was diagnosed with colon cancer. By the time another doctor found it, it was too late and said there was no way it should have been missed."
20. "I'd constantly complain to my doctor that I couldn’t breathe when I would walk and I would feel shortness of breath, I was always tired and fatigued and I would get dizzy if I walked for too long. She always brushed it off and told me to get more sleep or drink more water even though I was getting plenty of both. Finally I made an appointment to talk to her face to face and she flat out just told me I was lazy and needed to exercise more. I was so embarrassed because I went with my husband and she made me feel like I was just this lazy couch potato."
"I switched doctors and my new doc decided to do blood work, which is something the other doctor should have done in the first place, and found out I was severely anemic to the point of needing blood transfusions. I felt so much better after I got my infusions."
21. "When I was around seven years old, a doctor told my parents I had gotten used to all the attention after having an emergency appendectomy and was pretending to still be in excruciating pain. In reality, they'd left acid around and it was literally burning tissue and creeping over to my liver then I spent a month in the hospital. A different doctor who used to be a family friend once told my six-year-old sister that Tourettes Syndrome wasn't real and she needed to stop faking it. I can't tell you how damaging that was and what it took to help her feel secure with her tics again."
22. "I was 14 years old when I started to take medicine where I was forbidden to get pregnant because there would be horrible birth defects. So in order to get that medicine, I needed to be on birth control. My doctor asked me if I was a virgin, which I confirmed. He called in a nurse and told me he needed to do a quick exam to confirm this before prescribing birth control. He said, 'This might hurt, so the nurse will hold your hand,' and then he broke my hymen, which hurt like hell."
"I remember crying and not understanding what happened. He confirmed that I was indeed a virgin and prescribed birth control. He pat me on my back as I left and called me a good girl. I still hate him with the burning intensity of a thousand desert suns.
Several years later, I learned that he did not have to do that in order to prescribe birth control. And since I was a minor, he needed my parents' permission — my parents were horrified when I told them years later."
23. And, "When I went to my gyno a few years ago after the check-up, he asked me, 'What’s your husband’s name?' I said I didn’t have a husband. Then he asked for my boyfriend’s name, and I said I didn’t have one. 'Wow, you just go through a lot of batteries,' the doctor said. I’ve had doctors say really shitty things to me, and I would say this is shocking."
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-800-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.