Asklemmy

My wife, going through peri-menopause, was told (after reporting extremely low energy, increased migraines, and low libido) by her doctor that he wasn't comfortable doing any hormonal supplements until a year after menopause was confirmed finished. That could potentially be up to a decade later.

Women's health comprehension is fucking embarrassing... if you were AFAB and have any sort of hormonal or abdominal issues, please see a fucking specialist immediately. Most GPs/Family Doctors are absolutely fucking clueless.

I had an issue where food would get stuck while eating. It wasn't chocking, as I was still able to breathe. It was more like the food would slowly make its way to my stomach and sometimes it would come back up. I told my doctor at the time, but he dismissed it as me eating too fast. So I tried to eat slower and just dealt with it. Several years pass and I got married and moved away and thus ended up with a new doctor. My wife asked me to ask the new doctor about my condition, and I told her that he would probably dismiss it, which is what ended up happening. That doctor ended up leaving the practice (which I wasn't too upset about) and I ended up with a new doctor. The new doctor seemed more receptive to what I had to say, but I was reluctant to tell her about it since I've had two doctors dismiss me already. My wife again asked me to ask the new doctor about it, and this time I was taken seriously. The doctor set me up with a specialist and I had a procedure done that pretty much fixed my problem and now I can eat without having my food get stuck.

Nothing on that level of messed up, but probably the worst for me was having a homeopathic doctor as a child who prescribed me sugar pills as medicine.

"It's not whooping cough. Sure, you have all the symptoms of whooping cough and live in an area with an active whooping cough outbreak, doesn't matter, I don't think it's whooping cough."

multiple visits later in a single week as symptoms worsen

"Fine, here's a prescription for amoxicillin, you hypochondriac, but I don't think it will do anything for you."

whooping cough clears up completely

I do trust medical science but that experience was easily the worst of my adult life. Whooping cough is no joke, folks.

I was having some unusual medical issues and went to a doctor recommended by a friend. They seemed OK. I researched their treatment and it seemed OK. After a while I was having severe side effects and decided to find a more main stream doctor, a proper endocrinologist.

They were appalled at the dosage from the previous doctor. I had been started on 2x the maximum dose! Usually people start at 0.5x the dose and step up if it's not enough.

That went fine for a bit, but I was having some discomfort administering the medicine and asked my GP. He lost his temper (not at me). The previous 2 doctors had gone straight to the simplest but most side effects solution. He explained that there are 5 different treatments for my condition! I was suffering thru unnecessary side effects because the previous doctors hadn't even discussed these other solutions with me. I wasn't aware of them at all.

So pissed.

I've had eczema all my life. Mostly on my face/arms/legs, whenever exposed (summer/winter). Have been prescribed a shitton of steroid-based ointments. That never worked. From GP to dermatologists, they never knew coz "eczema can't be explained", so they always "assumed" stuff, blaming the heat, the cold, the dust, the sun, the water, too much soap, too little soap (calling me dirty).

Not once did they (offer me to) test for allergies. Just assumed it was something unexplainable. Just live with it.

Even been called a liar when I told them those steroid-based ointments actually make it worse.

I moved to another country, still had this eczema. Worse actually. 1 GP visit and an allergy test later it appears I have a mold allergy.

Doesn't help I have lived and still live in an even more humid environment. Rain is the worst, because the spores come out. But with the help of some anti-histamines I have been eczema free for a few years. Mold thrives on steroids, so I avoid that.

That time in 2004 I requested a specific kind of birth control from my doctor because I had just had a baby with the most horrific postpartum depression you could ever imagine, and I never wanted to go through that ever again.

In retrospect it's clear that the doctor was uncomfortable with the mere thought of inserting an IUD, he had probably never done it before, and he did not want to do it. He didn't say that, but the discomfort on his face was obvious, and he talked me up about some sort of a birth control patch like a sticker that I wear on my arm.

I did not want a sticker on my arm. I wanted an IUD.

But he sent me away with the arm sticker and I didn't want it so I didn't put it on. I felt hopeless and unheard and invalidated and that nothing I wanted mattered.

Two years later my husband got me pregnant again 😭

Postpartum depression is absolutely hell and I wouldn't wish this psychological trauma on Hitler himself.

17 years later the good news is my second child turned out to be the most angelic cute brilliant hilarious precious gift you could ever imagine.

I’ve had ~ a dozen minor bad experience with doctors and nurses, and one awful experience (still not as bad as assault).

The worst one started with severe endometriosis pain, I was hyperventilating (without realizing it) for hours. My fingers eventually curled up and rendered my hands useless, which triggered a panic attack and more hyperventilating. I went to the ER because I had never experienced a loss of function in my hands before, it was terrifying. The nurse stuck me in a room and left me to my terror for hours, I cried and begged for someone to help me. Another nurse came by at some point, I heard them outside asking “is she okay?” and my main nurse just told them I was being stupid and needed to cry it out. She eventually came in to explain that hyperventilating causes a buildup of CO2 in the blood, which led to my fingers curling up, so I had to calm down for it to improve. She at no point offered me any kind of calmative, not even something basic like gabapentin. I eventually felt enough shame that I calmed down and went home.

All the little experiences just fucked with my ability to trust my doctors (as individuals, not medicine as a whole). Doctors just blankly staring at me when I show them something they’ve never seen before, or telling me that the 3” tumor growing on my leg is “so small it’s almost nothing!” when they know I have a genetic mutation that severely limits my cells abilities to keep benign tumors from turning into cancer. I have a handful of health issues I need to go see doctors for again, but I have no confidence they won’t just tell me it’s all in my head again.

Edit: oh yea, the most comical time was when a dentist gaslit me about basic human anatomy. I’m not a doctor but I have a B.S., I can read basic anatomy diagrams. I get really intense pain at the hinge of my jaw, right in front of my ears, when I eat something for the first time in a few hours. It’s definitely salivary stones. My dentist told me that salivary glands don’t exist there, so that can’t be it. Except they do. It’s pretty easy to figure that out lol. I asked her “okay, what else could it be then?” And she just grunted at me.

When I first got officially diagnosed with depression the doc prescribed me an antidepressant and when I asked about sideffects he said "noone ever gets any sideffects from this med". It literally had a black box warning and a CVS recipt of known sideeffects. Also yes there were definitely sideffects. Luckily the pharmacist wasn't a moron like the doc and actually told me what to expect.

Jfc, I'm sorry that happened to you, how awful.

I've had all sorts of bad experiences, from one doctor looking down my top at my boobs without warning or permission, to the "normal" doubt dismissal and denial of anything being wrong with me despite much evidence to the contrary..

Doctors so often fucking suck, and I'm so sick of it being taboo to even say so. Medical school should include bringing them down a couple of pegs before they're ever allowed to even interact with patients.

I had a primary care woman who felt there was no need to talk about birth control since I was married. 20+ years married and no kids. whooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!

After a minor gynecologic surgical procedure I was feeling really anxious and could barely feel anything since the local anaesthetic was still in effect. The doctor left the room, and the nurse (a woman past her 50s) said I peed myself and that I should be careful when leaving since it was likely to happen again. It was all a lie, as I later realised. When I was able to check myself and saw I was perfectly fine and dry, I understood what that fleeting moment of glee on her face was all about.

Bitch Nurse I hope you die of chronic incontinence if any such thing exists.

My partner was admitted to the hospital when they couldn't inflate his collapsed lung, as it had a hole in it. They put him on a machine that uses negative pressure to keep the lung shaped as it should be. Normally the hole should close but it wasn't. Ended up with surgery but the problem remained. They were coming up with increasingly outlandish theories as to why it wasn't healing, even going so far as to test him for tuberculosis, and listing him as false negative for covid. They also denied him adequate pain management, until one nurse noticed and gave him ibuprofen to go with paracetamol. This was all when the covid vaccine was only just out so I had to sit by helplessly while I'm increasingly realising the level of care he is receiving doesn't match my expectations. But he's never even been in a hospital and self advocacy is not something he's learned.

Eventually they transfer him to a larger hospital. The doctor there doesn't want to talk straight but between the lines you get the message that he feels the case was entirely mismanaged. They immediately lower the reverse pressure. Hold off on further surgery. Within days healing begins. A week later the lung is healed. It's a miracle...

Anyway, we looked into legal options but there was a lack of proof. The original doctor followed procedure. Yet I'm 100% convinced that because my partner smokes, has bad teeth and looks like a metalhead, there was prejudice at play. I can't know for sure but I feel like the original doctor blamed my partner and figured she'd have to scare him straight. That didn't help of course, he resumed smoking and he's unwilling to seek help because of this experience. I'm honestly shocked at how this could happen, but as time goes on I've seen in other situations how people immediately conclude a person is lower class and thus must be treated differently. If you do one thing for yourself, look into self advocacy. Especially when it comes to medical stuff. My own level of care started to go up when I began to have a conversation with health professionals, outlining my experience and asking many questions. But I'm a middle class woman with fairly conventional looks, so there is a whole level of prejudice I immediately don't face.

Went to a doctor for a twisted ankle, who told me that my feet had exaggerated arches. When asked what that meant (as in- medically, what problems could that cause) he laughed and replied that it meant I had "ugly fucking feet".

A bit hard to explain, but I had an accident once that screwed up my wrist. If you look at your wrist, there's a bone that sticks out forming a little lump. underneath it is another round bone called the perilunate. My perilunate got dislodged and ended up pinching off the nerves to my fingers (carpal tunnel) and essentially shut down three of my fingers. My wrist was x-rayed and two separate doctors who looked at the x-ray told me everything was fine.

I asked "Are you sure?" I'm no stranger to pain but something felt totally off there. I was assured everything was ok, and to go to my doctor in a month if things didn't get better. A month later, I went to another doc because it was not better at all, who took another x-ray and sent me home. I had just gotten home when he phoned me in a panic and told me to head straight back to the hospital for an expert to look at. He was in total disbelief that both doctors didn't notice. I had surgery and three steel pins put into my wrist the next morning to hold things in place. Here's the x-ray with a rather noticable bone out of place. https://i.imgur.com/n2rHYuw.jpg and after the pins were put in to hold things in place while it healed. https://i.imgur.com/Cnh0QwK.jpg

TLDR: I ran around for a month with a bone on the wrong side of my wrist because two doctors were in a hurry.

That time in 2006 I had a really good OBGYN that was seeing me through from the beginning of my pregnancy all the way to my childbirth, but somewhere along the way at one of my visits he said there was a visiting doctor on the floor who wanted to examine me and asked for my permission and consent and I'm like

sure whatever, why wouldn't I trust a doctor? If he needs to do something and learn something for his professional credentials, sure, go ahead whatever you need to do. I didn't say all those words, but that was the gist of the exchange.

Then for some reason my doctor and the nurse chaperone left the room(?!) so it was just that visiting Dr and me in the room and he got creepy wanting to touch my cervix and he looked me in the eye while he did it and it was just a creepy vibe, and I could tell he was being a perv about it.

Extremely unprofessional.

and it's not like I was even sexy. A wild jungle of pubic hairs, fat, there was nothing sexy about me, he was just a sick twisted doctor

and I wonder whatever became of him. I never saw him before or since and I never got around to reporting the incident because it took a while for my brain to comprehend that what he did was not appropriate, and I had a million other things going on in my life, this was just a weird thing that happened that got lost in the jumble of all the other life events.

It happened at Trinity Health Hospital in Minot North Dakota.

I had a baby last year, and while I was lucky to have an uncomplicated and smooth birth, my experience with lactation was hellish. I had no frame of reference to be able to anticipate how painful breast feeding could be, and my discomfort and suffering were constantly dismissed and downplayed by every nurse I encountered. They basically played it off as "oh you're just not used to it" and told me my baby's latch was fine so I must be fine. One nurse even squeezed my (extremely sore and sensitive) breast while attempting to show me how to feed my baby. I tried telling them the breast pump machines hurt me even on the lowest setting and they just waved me off with a "well it's gotta be done" attitude. When my milk finally did come in it was literally the worst pain I've ever experienced. I woke my husband up with a wailing howl of anguish that made him think the baby had died. When I called the women's health line, trying to explain what I was going through in between gasps and choking back tears they said they couldn't help me but they'd have someone call me back. No one did. I ended up spending the night hyperventilating and in tears trying to massage myself while my husband tried to soothe me.

In every other respect my baby and I got exemplary care. I just got the impression that my experience with having so much pain must be rare, and because of that they figured it couldn't happen or I was just making shit up. I certainly had no idea it could hurt, it wasn't even on my radar of things to be worried about, but turned out to be the worst part of having a baby. I did make an effort to make myself heard, and made some complaints at follow up appointments, but who knows if they took it seriously.

A woman I know, younger than 30, received the "husband stitch" after giving birth. She does not trust medical professionals, and I don't blame her.

That time in the year 2000 I had gotten extremely ill and I had never felt such peculiar horrific illness in my life, it was like a flu but worse and weirder and I felt like I was going to die because I couldn't eat I couldn't stand up, (I'm normally an extremely healthy active person), this went on for a couple weeks and I lived alone which made it impossible to see a doctor because I couldn't drive myself in that condition,

but thankfully I had a spiritually intuitive friend who had a feeling she should call me and thankfully she did and she arranged for one of her friends to drive me to the hospital.

So I saw my primary care physician and he was very dismissive of me. When he came into the room he saw me laying on the crackly paper bed and he insultingly thought I was faking sick and trying to get out of work, and told me to sit up. He mockingly said "oh you're not feeeeling well?" He troubled himself to run a throat culture on me then sent me home. I was not feeling well enough to go back home and die alone.

The next day my same friend arranged to come pick me up and take me to the emergency room where they admitted me into the hospital.

I was hospitalized for 2 weeks apparently I had cytomegalovirus, and they ran all kinds of tests on me including general anesthesia for throat probe down to my intestines, an eye exam for some reason, but mostly those two weeks were a complete blur to me, I mostly slept all the time.

The husband and son of my friend came to pick me up from the hospital when it was all over, and I was recuperating at home for another week before returning to work, when I got a phone call from my original primary care physician and he said "You know what, your throat culture came back looking a little unusual."

I'm like

"No shit! I was just hospitalized nearly dead for 2 weeks. Now you're calling me a month later telling me my throat culture was slightly abnormal? If I'd waited here all that time for your phone call, I wouldn't have answered the phone because I would've been dead. Thanks for nothing."

I didn't actually say all those things to them, we don't think of how to respond to such things until years later.

Your story is quite something. Can't beat that.

For mine:
I suspect my orthodontist messed up my jaw as my bite is now skewed to one side (left is deeper than right).
Reason for why: I got removable braces (was/am afraid of glued braces in regards to feeling and social stigma) and they had a bridge in the back. Since the resting position of the tongue is around where the the metal wire bridge was it cut into the sides and I probably compensated by lowering my tongue position.
If I swallow the accumulated saliva I'd push the tip of my tongue against my front teeth and by that pushing apart the gap between my jaw rows.
The orthodontist obviously denied it but I am still thinking about that. and it would all add up...

Nothing serious but when I was a kid my doctor regularly forgot to mark my blood samples with my age, resulting in me having to take Vitamin supplements on and off because the values flip-flopped between "way too low (for an adult)" and "way too high (for a 10 year old kid)"

Luckily my parents wizened up to that after a year and we switched doctors, was not a nice experience but still on the more harmless side of things

Edit: I do have a really messed up one. Back when I was a little toddler crawling on all fours my parents gave me milk in glass bottles, which is a good idea because plastics are obviously bad until you consider toddler behaviour. Well things inevitably happened and toddler me dropped the bottle while sitting on a bench. Toddler me then had nothing better to do than to follow the bottles course and fall into the glass pile. Parents rushed me to a child surgeon, he removed "all" glass pieces from my elbow. A few days after the OP the wound starts watering badly, so my parents go back to the doc. Nope he says, all the glass is removed. Wound doesn't get better so my parents go to a normal surgeon. Dude looks at the wound, cancels his plans and essentially emergency operates the wound because lo and behold there were still glass fragments in my elbow. Scars being what scars are I now have a ~10 cm and a ~5cm scar stretching across my left elbow. Guess the only good part about it is that I was too young to remember that shitshow.

I kept coming in with early signs of a treatable but very serious condition and they were waved away until it got very bad.

I'm fine now but easily could have died from it

Well my doctor uses yahoo mail and tried to make me send PII and pictures of my medical stuff to that email. I sent it password protected using protonmail so it doesn't get stored in yahoo's servers. Nothing too insane but that's pretty much because other than that, my experiences with doctors have been alright.

Anyone with a condition like HIV or cancer will tell you that every ailment you ever report is totes obvs related to that condition and not, you know, a freestanding one that needs its own treatment.

My senses are telling me to stay quiet on this one.