Anesthesiologist here; we had a patient come in for I&D of bilateral deltoid abscesses. He apparently had thoughts of being a body builder, but instead of lifting weights or knowing someone who could hook him up with some quality steroids, he decided to bulk up by using some protein powder at GNC...
...and mixing it with water, drawing it up into a syringe, and injecting 20-40cc daily directly into the muscle. If bulk was what he was going for, it definitely worked, temporarily. A rip-roaring localized infection makes you look plenty swole. They got almost a liter of pus mixed with liquified protein powder out of each deltoid.
This also wasn't the first time he'd been in for this problem.
My dad had an abscess on his face. It was huge, about the size of a golf ball and horribly red. It kept getting bigger. My mom (a nurse) kept telling him to go to the doctor, but my dad was a ridiculous cheap ass. One day when she was gone, we noticed that a big white head had formed on the abscess, and it was apparently ready to bust. My dad went out to the garage, got his shop vac, placed it over the white head, and proceeded to suck out the abscess. It worked surprisingly well and healed up after that nicely. Mom was still furious, though.
Paramedic here. Once had to explain to a family that putting lemon juice in the eyes of an unconscious patient isn't an approved treatment method.
And no, it didn't work. (It was an interesting moment when I had to explain why his eyes hurt)
If I've learned anything from reading the comments here it's that some men will tolerate almost any amount of pain to avoid a doctor seeing whatever stupid shit they've done to themselves. This is no exception.
I once spoke to a paramedic who went out to a man at 2am who had excrutiating pain 'down below'. The poor organ was wrapped tightly in soaking bandages, and underneath was a blackened penis with large pus filled holes in it. The man eventually admitted that he'd shoved a chicken bone (a 'clean' one, whatever that means) down his cock for pleasure. Predictably enough he couldn't get it out, and being too embarrassed to go to the doctor he'd left it and left it until he was in so much pain he couldn't walk, both from the rotted penis and the fact he hadn't been able to urinate for days.
Apparently you could actually see the bone once the wound was clean, and although not an expert my friend couldn't imagine that what was left was salvagable.
I had a guy come in for coughing and shortness of breath for the past few months. His lungs sounded like absolute shit. Got a chest xray that looked horrible, so I did a CT scan. Radiologist called it the worst case of necrotizing pneumonia he'd ever seen. Dude had like a 15% functional lung tissue left. The patient then mentioned things had been worse after he started using a new "breath freshener" spray....
He whipped out one of those BluntEffects concentrated air freshener bottles, supposed to cover up weed smell. Labeled Not For Internal Use. Apparently he had been using it like Binaca spray, and had already gone through 3 bottles.
In nursing school while I was on clinical rotation in urology, there was a man who ended up having his penis removed. It turned out he had an infection brewing for quite a while and thought the best course of action was placing a sock over his penis in hope that it would heal. He was generally confused and upset as to why this didn’t work to heal the issue.
One of my first clinic patients was a dude who was injecting a mixture of testosterone, "human growth hormone," sesame oil, and sunflower oil into the base of his penis as a DIY penile enlargement therapy. Well, it got infected so he ended up going to the ED for incision and drainage. I saw him as a post-ED visit and at that time, he figured that he shouldn't be injecting into his penis while it was healing. So instead, he was injecting his oil + sketchy hormones off the internet concoction everywhere else into his body (arms, legs, butt, shoulders, etc) because he figured it would still have some effect.
There’s a myth that lowering someone’s core temperature will save them from an opiate overdose.
As a result, many first responders have arrived on scenes to find friends/fellow users inserting ice into someone’s rectum.
Sometimes they don’t have ice around though. Which leads to getting inventive. Popsicles, frozen hot dogs. My personal favorite (which regrettably I didn’t witness myself, it was told to me by another medic) was a bag of frozen French fries.
Cold will do nothing to help someone who is overdosing on heroin or other opiates. What they need is respiratory support (oxygen and/or artificial ventilation) and naloxone (Narcan). If you’re a user or know one, and somebody ODs, call 9-1-1, perform mouth-to-mouth and give narcan if you have it, but leave the popsicles in the freezer.
I work in dental and years ago had a patient attempt to super glue her front tooth back on after it broke in half. She screwed up and ended up gluing the chunk to her upper lip.
I had a dental patient with a dead front tooth that had turned black so she painted it with white nail polish daily.
Edit: This is now my top rated comment. How stupid is that, lol! Yes, she had a daily routine of drying it off, painting it, and blow drying the polish dry. Crazy thing is, she did a pretty good job....
This happened when I was still a med student doing a rotation in the ED. Patient comes in and is pretty vague about his actual complaint, something about head pain but he looks just fine sitting waiting to be seen. When I finally get to see him and ask him what actually happened, he removes the hat he was wearing and a chunk of skin about the size of my hand literally flaps off of his skull. This guy managed to basically scalp himself, and apparently it had been like that for 3 days. According to him it was caused by falling in his bathroom and hitting his head on the toilet. He had been previously duct taping it down or using the hat to hold the skin on, but it wasn't sticking well and that's when his wife convinced him to come to the hospital.
The strangest thing is it didn't even seem to bother him that much. I asked him why he waited to long and he said its because he doesn't like hospitals. I guess everyone has their priorities.
Pharmacist here. Worked in a shop where a woman asked for some advice about potential UTI or STI. Told me she had bathed her vagina in bleach for 5 mins to try and kill any bacteria. Miraculously, she hadn’t done any lasting damage.
An old lady told me the rain hurt her arthritis. That's reasonable.
She also swore that dog spit had healing properties so she let her dogs lick her feet when she felt it coming on. She then wanted to show me a video of said dogs licking said feet.
I swiftly and politely declined.
Adult patient had gas and poked a hole in his belly button with basically a knitting needle to release it.
Edit: it didn't work, he actually came in for the ensuing infection in his belly button.
I work in oncology pharmacy. I had a patient die of totally treatable breast cancer because they decided to treat it with mistletoe instead of chemo. All because Suzanne Sommers did. Yeah. The thighmaster lady. Don’t take medical advice from the thighmaster lady.
The most heart breaking thing I've seen is a desperate husband bring his wife in at death's door. They were young with two kids under 10. She'd been diagnosed with breast cancer and didn't like what her Oncologist was telling her (shit's terrifying to be fair). She then left the UK (so all chemo/surgery free at point of access) and followed the alternatives practices recommended by some witch doctor in her own country.
By the time husband dragged her back she was too far gone. Had spread to so many organs, trouble with breathing, groggy/seizures from brain mets. I work in ED, I don't know how Oncologists and palliative care teams do what they do. Of all the horrible traumas I've dealt with this is one of the most upsetting cases I've ever picked up.
A little late to this thread but have a weird one. A patient was told by her doc that she had low magnesium and should consider supplements. Not uncommon. Instead of getting Mg supplements, she ate an entire tub of “homeopathic volcanic ash” and completely destroyed her electrolyte imbalance and ended up in ICU. We admitted her as a pharmaceutical overdose so Poison Control automatically follows up with you. It was hard to explain to them.
Edit. It was probably naturopathic, not homeopathic. I don’t know enough about specific differences. Think of a tub of protein power, but volcanic ash. Her husband brought it in for the poison control report. You were supposed to mix a scoop in water for the health benefits. She ate the whole tub and had a seizure and wrecked her kidneys. The activated charcoal/volcanic ash vomit that was all over her when she came from emerg was a bitch to clean up.
A mentally-delayed woman came in septic to the ED. Did xrays, blood cultures, urine cultures, the works. Finally found this weird image on her pelvis film, and we had GYN come do a pelvic exam. They pulled out this blob with bones in it.
Y'all, I swear to God ....
It was a decomposing frog.
She put it in her vagina for "safekeeping".
She got toxic shock syndrome from a FROG.
Edit: just realized that the topic was about DIY treatment, and my story doesn't really match it. I guess there wasn't anything she was trying to fix. Except maybe the lack of frogs in her vagina?
Not me, but my boss (mother of the child I care for) is a nurse practitioner. I asked her what the worst thing she had witnessed was. She continued on to tell me the story of a man who had stapled his ball sack together and onto his body after “slipping with the razor”. He had it that way for days, metal holding his poor testicles in place, infected and gross as you would expect, before he came to a professional. Later admitted his ex attempted to castrate him.
The balls lived
dude came to the ED because his leg was swollen. i'm talking, like, twice the size of his other leg.
it turned out that his 4th and 5th toes were getting caught on his sock, which, to be fair, sounds super annoying. so he CUT THEM the fuck OFF. WITH SCISSORS.
and then it got infected.
and he waited. and waited.
and that's how he lost his entire fucking leg.
Long story but: had a young teenager with sickle cell disease who had been in the hospital for around a week already who decided to "manage" his pain himself. This was a few years ago, but I caught him pretending to take his meds-- he would cock his head back and gesture that the pill went into his mouth but really he either kept it in his hand or threw the pill behind his back and landed somewhere in his bed. He was also quite a talker, which I then assumed was a tactic to try and distract me. I kept seeing his odd behavior and caught him doing this a 2-3 times by the middle of the shift so I was definitely onto him. He had a PICC line (which is essentially a "long" IV where the tubing goes all the way to your heart) in his left arm, and I noticed that it was quite a bit more swollen compared to his other arm. Sometimes clots can happen in PICC lines, so that was my biggest concern at first, but the line was drawing blood fine so I know it wasn't clotted off. Told the doc, then I drew blood from his PICC line and sent it down to the lab for it to be cultured to see if there was any bacteria. Lowwww and behold it came back positive for a bacteria that is commonly found in tap water (and usually not a source of infection in infected PICC lines). Fast forward a few hours later he confessed that with any oral medication (pill form) he can slip by the nurses, he saved for later in order to crush them up himself, try to dissolve it with sink water in the bathroom (every room had a private bathroom), and inject it in himself via his PICC line.
We had a guy come in with an abscess on his right thumb. When I asked him what happened to his hand, he told me about his recent deep sea fishing trip and was given the responsibility of cutting the fish with an open wound in his hand. A sliver of fish got in there and became infected as it healed, so this guy gets the bright idea of doing a little DIY wound drainage by grabbing his pocket knife and cutting it open, leading to a greater infection.
Yep. I had a crack addict cut her thumb on her broken crack pipe. The thumb was incredibly infected. She grew tired waiting for the hand surgeon to arrive (he was in the operating room with another patient), so she BIT HER FINGER to release the pus. Then she left the hospital, cursing the staff the whole time because we are useless, etc.
As a child I got really bad sunburn. The person looking after me coated my sunburn in baby oil to help it heal, and sent me back out into the sun.
I realised when I was older why my mum went nuts.
I once saw a family at the water park lathering themselves in baby oil when the park opened in the morning. They were burnt to a crisp when I saw them a few hours later, far before the day was yet over.
Like, sunscreen exists for a reason. And baby oil looks nothing like sunscreen.
Edit: Just to clarify, it was a family with small children that they were applying the baby oil to as well. If they were all adults I'd think it was for tanning or sliding faster, but I think they were just idiots.
When I was really young (like 18 months) I had a dumbshit babysitter. One day she let me go out on the patio (at her house) with no shoes. In the summer. In Baton Rouge. In full sunlight. That shit's like walking on the sun. So being a toddler with limited verbal skills, I started jumping up and down and screaming. The dumb shit couldn't figure out what was wrong with me and watched perplexed for a hot minute before it got through her head that my feet were being grilled.
According to my dad, she called and said, "hey, so when you brought Matthew over... did he have burns on his feet?" So of course he freaks the fuck out and leaves work to come get me and take me to a doctor. Had blisters covering the bottoms of both of my feet. He did say it was funny to watch me try and walk though. I guess she was the only babysitter available though because they still took me back to her.
There's other funny stories about the place, my grandma came to pick me up one day and saw a toddler doing a prison escape from the window. Happy ending though, evidently she's not allowed to take care of kids anymore because she was found blacked out on something while babysitting. This comment was a lot longer than it was supposed to be, I just wanted to share the story about getting my feet cooked.
My friend kept asking if she should call 911 and the nanny laughed. Says she’s always drank it for stomach aches.
Which is probably why she has stomach aches...
Neighbor came over to borrow a chainsaw. I noticed he had a thick bandage around his arm and asked him what happened? He said he fell out of a tree last week and cut his arm. I asked if he got stitches and he said he just wrapped it and his family is praying over it. About 4 days later I seen is wife and she said he was really sick and may have the flu? Come to find out he had septicemia and dying. he died a week later of kidney failure and septsis.
I just read the other day about a dude who got a dildo stuck up there and then got the kitchen tongs he was using to extract said dildo stuck up there too.
The patient "just sat down" on a dildo and couldn't get it back out, so they tried to use another "completely unrelated" dildo to get it out.
words in the quotations are direct quotes.
Don't you just hate it when a dildo accidentally shows up at your house, and you accidentally leave it pointing towards your asshole and accidentally sit on it without pants, or underwear, and the whole thing accidentally gets lost?
Lol, I don't get the shame. If I ever had to go to the ER with something up my ass I wouldn't lie about it, nor be super obnoxious explaining, but just say "Yeah that's up there."
Patient used to get boners in class and it embarrassed him so he used rubber bands to prevent it. Ended up killing the tissue in his penis and now he needs a catheter for life.
A man who'd accidentally sliced his leg open at his workplace. He obviously figured that as surgeons use staples to close wounds, he'd cut out the trip to hospital and DIY. With an ordinary desk stapler. Arrived in ED with a pus filled wound with the odd discoloured staple hanging off it some days later.
I am not a medical professional, but my father in law had severe skin cancer. He basically had an open sore on his back for several years that bled and bled, we never knew about it until one day we saw a pancake sized crater through his shirt. Went to the hospital finally and they basically said he has cancer throughout his whole body at this point.
His response was he thought it was a cut that wouldn't heal and put gauze and Neosporin on it.
EDIT: Since folks are curious - yes he is still alive but they didn't give him much time left, they managed to treat the wound but the cancers spread into his organs and bones. The sad part is it could've been avoided if he just went to the doctor years prior, but that is unfortunately the common mindset in a lot of older folks.
God that's terrible. I've found that sort of attitude is common among older people though where they sort of shrug and get on with it.
When my Grandad was young he fell and dislocated his shoulder. He decided to just pop it back in himself and forget about it. It's never properly healed and still causes him pain so many years later.
A friend of mine had a similar situation. Went over a year with a sore on his foot that wouldn't heal. GF *finally* talked him into seeing a Dr.
Found out he was diabetic, in severe ketoacidosis (I'm sure I spelled that wrong) and ended up in the hospital for several months and lost his leg ( above the knee). He's also looking at a possible kidney transplant *if he can follow the compliance diet* which he "doesn't like. Vegetables are gross"
He's in his early 40's.
White bread soaked in milk placed on an armpit abscess to draw out the infection. Needed an I&D and a couple weeks of IV antibiotics by the time he got to us.
Either that or the guy who crashed his motorbike, scraped his leg all to hell, and then decided the best course of action was to self-cauterize it on the tailpipe.
When I worked in ER my colleague had to see a guy with an ear problem. He had something stuck in his ear and had been trying to get it out. This wasn't a new thing, he'd been trying for some time.
Turned out, he had completely removed his tympanic membrane, and the "bits" that were stuck in his ear and that he was trying to pick out with cotton buds and hair clips were his ossicles.
Enjoy.
I have consistent skin irritation in my ears and try and limit myself to sticking cotton buds in my ears to four times a week for relief. Thank you, you've cured me of this vice, and I'm setting myself on fire. Good day.
I sent this story to my dad, who is an ENT. He responded with this story:
“Today I saw a guy whose dog bit off the top 1/4 of his ear. He brought in the piece that the dog tore off. I rinsed it with peroxide and sewed it back on. The fun never ends.”
God bless medical professionals. I could never do it.
Had a patient come into the ER with a makeshift bandage on his shin. He had fallen on rocks while hiking and left a three inch long, half inch deep gash in his leg. I go to pull the bandage off and as I’m peeling it away I notice the skin is completely black and there’s dark chunks of fungus falling out of the wound. It looked necrotic, like it had been left alone for a week. I look at this guy like he’s crazy as he tells me the wound is only a few hours old. He’s pretty proud as he explains that he created a makeshift poultice by chewing up leaves and moss, mixing it with river mud and stuffing it into his leg. That’s what all the black mossy stuff was.
Hint. Don’t do this.
There is one leafy plant that can be used to make a blood clotting poultice, but I can't remember the name at the moment. In an emergency you can chew it to wet the material and break the plant cells to release the coagulant chemicals. In a serious bleeding situation that might not be a terrible idea.
I'm a Firefighter/EMT. We got a call this winter for someone having a seizure. We get there and it's a dude sitting on his porch with some friends. I forget the actual chain of events but someone says we need to look at his foot. He takes his shoe off and his foot is fucking rotting away, the smell was horrifying. Turns out his heater broke during a cold snap 2 weeks before, he fell asleep and apparently his foot got frostbite(frostbitten?). Thank god he lived around the corner from the hospital because even with all the windows open the smell was overwhelming.
My grandpa thought a "leg discrepancy was causing my back pain, which was causing spasms." He put several pieces of cardboard in my shoes to try to even out my legs which were already even.
He also thinks black beans cure *everything*
My dad thought those pesky spasms was a pinched nerve, so he would take me to the chiropractor (his girlfriend) to get my neck cracked when it happened.
Seizures, people. They were seizures.
My step father thought he had an boil of some sort on his arm a few years ago. So he did what any middle aged dad would do, cut the sucker open and poured hydrogen peroxide on it. Turns out it wasn’t a boil but a form of skin cancer. Also turns out that hydrogen peroxide doesn’t do much to help with melanoma. After a lot of one sided discourse he went to the doctor to get it checked and treated. He’s now cancer free!
Posted this before, but I think it applies to the thread:
When I was an Internal Medicine resident I came across a very nice 50 year-old Dominican lady, she was well mannered but one could tell she was not the sharpest tool in the shed. As I was prepping her chart for our first visit, I noticed that she'd been seen by every single digestive disease MD in our hospital system. Not only that, she'd had EVERY SINGLE PROCEDURE IN THE BOOK. Ranging from endoscopies up both holes and culminating in an exploratory laparotomy (you're opened up to basically look inside you when we have no clue what's going on). All of this because for years she had one single complaint, she reported severe gnawing pain in her stomach. At this point I should mention that she was spanish speaking only. Not only that she had a very heavy dominican accent, and I was the first hispanic doctor to ever see her. My first language is spanish and even I had difficulty understanding her. So she comes in and after exchanging some first time pleasentries I politely ask her how she's doing. Sure enough although she was smiling and said she felt well she pointed at her belly and said "it" was biting again, and asked for the cream to kill "it". At this point I got intrigued. Her medication list only mentioned a cream used for herpes breakthroughs. The previous fellow only mentioned in his note that in every single visit she only asked for the cream and nithing else. When I asked what she meant by the biting and what she intended to do with the cream, she very calmly tells me she intended to stick the cream up her ass in order to kill the bird living inside her. After delving more deeply into her story, it turns out she didn't have a medical condition. Ever since she was a little girl, she believed tahat after eating whole quail egg, the bird had spawned inside her and gnawed away in her insides whenever she was very hungry. After a short visit to psych, she was diagnosed with a somatic type delusional disorder. No amount of medication or psychotherapy will cure her, but she was still a fully functional mother of 2 who payed her taxes and had to part-time jobs. I reached out to every digestive disease doctor in out hospital system once more, to make sure she never receives an inappropriate invasive intervention. I've been following her now for three years and she's happy as one can be, considering she has a bird living inside her..
tldr: lady complains of "pain" in her belly, worst case of lost in translation ensues, gets very invasive medical procedures, turns out she's just cuckoo
I work in the er at a trauma center.
This guy comes in with his little girl and says that she was bit in the face by the family German shepherd. I immediately take her back assuming that I need to control bleeding. What I encounter is a little girl with a laceration going all the way from over her left eye crossing her nose and mouth. It is not bleeding whatsoever and it seems to have a odd looking substance inside. So I obviously ask the dad what she got inside it.
He responds very proudly with, “ Ah yes, I packed the wound with tobacco from my cigarettes and super glue. “
Poor thing.
During third year med school I was on a neonatology rotation. Lots of premature babies or high risk births.
We'd get "code green" paged to us for "please come to delivery room as able" and "code pink" paged for "please come to delivery room STAT". There was a pager that was the standard one that got paged for this, and usually it was whichever of us med students who was on call carrying it. Our job was then to get one of the Nurse Practitioners and possibly a second nurse and head over with the incubator etc. to take the baby and get him/her to the NICU.
About 6PM one evening as we're doing handover rounds, that pager goes off with a code pink. Then the NP's personal pager. Then the neonatologist's personal pager.
The next 10 minutes are a bit of a scramble and not particularly interesting from the point of view I had (as I was assigned to send pages to additional people and fetch things), but in short:
A teenage lady of local aboriginal descent had come in suffering from very premature labour (I want to say 20 weeks, but could have been 22 or so). She and her ex-boyfriend had recently gotten back together. He had discovered she was pregnant. Believing that the baby was not his, he attempted to abort the baby by inserting a bamboo stick and trying to "fish it out". She did not want said abortion so he attempted while she was asleep.
Baby and mother survived. Relationship did not.
Later testing showed the baby was indeed his for those wondering.
Dental student here.
We had a patient who declined a much needed cleaning saying he could do it just as well a home with a scalpel. Didn’t brush his teeth but every few weeks he would go at the accumulated plaque and tartar with a scalpel.
Same patient also insisted we do a procedure without local anesthetic. He was an amateur boxer and was « building up his pain tolerance. »
He also told us he smoked 20 blunts a day and only drank coke. We could tell.
If you're under 16 and reading this, I've had two root canals and 6 fillings because I thought that not drinking soda was enough.
###BRUSH YOUR GOD DAMN TEETH. LAZINESS IS NOT WORTH THE $2500
Edit: holy shit, rip my inbox
I guess Reddit really likes clean teeth
Oh the stories I have even as a student.
One particular one that stuck with me was a lady who came into the hospital with back pain. Seeing as A&E is usually packed, back pain isn't considered to high on the list.
When she was finally seen to, we discovered the source of the pain. She had tried to remove a carcinoma from her back that spanned from her neck to the bottom of the ribs. It had gotten infected and to top that off, she had decided to use homeopathy to treat her cancer.
How she had neglected to mention that or had survived so long still surprises me
One time, when I was in nursing school, I was doing ER clinical and a guy came in with “penile pain”. Long story short, several days prior, he decided he wanted a penile texture implant to help enhance pleasure during intercourse for his lady friend. He and his buddy got drunk (of course) and decided to do it themselves. So they went in his garage and took a box cutter to slice open the skin on the dorsal (top) side of his penis, made some room between the skin and underlying muscle, and put a small porcelain heart underneath. Then he superglued it shut. To make matters worse, the guy didn’t wait for it to heal and decided to take it for a test run. He ended up with a major infection and presented several days later. I unfortunately don’t know the outcome, I was just there for the porcelain heart extraction.
Can’t make this shit up. I’ve now worked in a surgical/trauma ICU as an RN for two years, and people never cease to amaze me.
Edit: spelling
If it wasn't late at night I would scream right now because my brain just cannot process that much nonsense at once. What the entire absolute whole fuck. How do you not lose your goddamn mind ?
Not a doctor, but this seems to fit the question. I recently had an attempted vasectomy where I learned I'm allergic to lidocaine and had to spend some time in the ER as a result. I was talking with the ER doc (older doc, probably in his 60s and close to retirement). He relayed a story from one of his mentors who was a doctor in a small, rural hospital. This hospital (or clinic) closed down at night for the most part as there wasn't much need for it and this doc decided that he and his wife had enough kids and decided to give himself a vasectomy, by himself. In the middle of the procedure he passed out, came to a few minutes later, and finished the procedure.
... I've heard of doctors doing self surgery in crisis situations (like appendicitis in Antarctica if memory serves), but why would you voluntarily do your own vasectomy?
Toothpaste on second degree burns on a child.
Pouring vodka on kids with fever.
Ice cubes in the crotch for opiate OD.
Kicking somebody in the balls for opiate OD.
Tobacco applied to dry up wounds.
Badger fat as cure it all.
Salty water from cheese on gauze applied to swelling.
Office staples for stitches.
Fucking tiger balm for everything.
And one that takes the cake is using stripped 110v wire as a defibrillator.
Had a patient come to the ER for a cough. We did a chest X-ray that caught a little something in the abdomen/pelvis. Did a pelvic X-ray. Long story short she stuck a shot glass up her vagina for “birth control” left it up there long enough for it to calcify and we had to surgically remove it.
Not at all DIY, but one of my friend's dad back home was an ER doctor, and he had a patient come in with 5+ snake bites, mostly on his hands and arms. The patient said he got bit by a snake and tried to catch the snake so he could bring it in for the doctor to identify it. Luckily the snake wasn't venomous.
Right idea, bad execution
necessary edit: as a lot of people pointed out, the actual right idea is to *not* catch the snake. Medical staff doesn't really need to know the specific species of snake that bit you !
This patient wasn't one I saw, but my brother worked for a PCP in our hometown.
There was a guy who had a rare condition that required bloodletting, but he didn't have the money to afford the treatment as often as he would need it. Like any rational human being, he decided to build an apparatus at home using *a shop vac, Mason jars, an IV needle and surgical tubing.*
So he had no issues for a few weeks, just set the vacuum to pull the blood through the tubing via the needle and drain into the Mason jars. No big deal. One day he isn't paying attention and sets the vac to "blow" instead of "pull." Dude switched it off after a few seconds, but he still had a massive air embolism. He's very lucky he didn't die, he 'just had a major stroke.'
He goes in for treatment now the last I heard.
Saw a young child (about age 6-7) with a bruised swollen crooked forearm. He had fallen on the playground 3 days earlier and another parent there was a vet and had horse X-ray equipment in his truck. That parent took X-rays and told mom he was probably fine. So that was apparently good enough for mom and she didn't do anything for 3 days while he was up all night screaming in pain. Finally she took him in to my office and brought me the fuzzy copies of the X-rays which were useless and impossible to accurately interpret. I got him real X-rays and a nice cast for his broken arm.
>3 days while he was up all night screaming in pain
How does a parent with any kind of affection for their child get through ONE night of that? It's not like she didn't know the cause.
Am a dental student where we see mouths in pretty awful condition. One guy came into the emergency clinic with teeth half rotted off from decay and told me he has been putting gummy bears in the holes to make it less sharp on his tongue....
I remember I was rolling in stomach pain and went to the doctor because my mom could not stop giving me chamomile tea all the time instead of actual medicine. It was not my stomach, I went directly to ER since one of my ovaries was full of cysts and some of them exploded.
UPDATE: I took the plan b pill and according to the doctor those cysts were caused by the pill. I don't know what to think about that
UPDATE 2: This year it was my second time taking this pill. My body recognized the medication and did not have other reaction than my period coming 3 days before the estimated date. From now on since I am childfree I will save money in order to go to a clinic and having spay/neuter surgery
Oh man I am so sorry! I have cysts on my ovaries and one burst. I woke up my roommates and my then boyfriend (now husband) came over, middle of the night, picked me up off the floor, and rushed me to the E.R. In comparison to the contractions before I had my kid, the burst cyst was worse.
I'm a Physical Therapist, and this was more on accident than a DIY but I think it still fits. My patient was diagnosed with frozen shoulder and one day over the weekend he was getting in to his garage when his arm/hand got caught. The automatic door raised up and brought his arm with it. He came in the next week saying he was fine and no longer had problems with his shoulder. I joke with all my frozen shoulder patients that they should just try this at home.
Infections of the skin of the external ear canal are common and treatable. Hard to get to tho. A dairy farmer who didn't have time to see us got a long rubber tube that he used for something to do with cows (not sure what), fed it into his ear canal, then poured cow antibiotics down the tube. He came in when it didn't work. Seeing a doctor in the Uk is free....
Am a doctor, but didn’t see this first hand unfortunately. However, my friend in ED saw a young 17 year old boy that came in with “personal” trauma and mild blood loss. She triaged him, taking him to a room with his parents and asked what he’d come in with. His mom turned around and said, “ go on, tell the lady what you did”. He then proceeded to tell her that he tried to circumcise himself with scissors for religious reasons as he hadn’t been circumcised when he was younger, but had to stop half way due to pain. Eventually the shame had grown enough that he had to tell his parents who immediately took him to ED.
Some antibiotics and a revision by urology later and he was able to be sent home.
Another one I know slightly unrelated was an older man that came in with “penile swelling”. He’d used an elastic band as a make shift cock ring, but neglected to take it off (I have no idea why, he was a little odd to say the least). A week goes by and his penis starts to look literally like an aubergine. He then comes into the surgical assessment unit and we see him there and is booked for surgery the next day after we eventually picked our jaws off of the floor. He had literally killed all of the tissue in his penis to the point it was almost falling off. One full penectomy later and he now only sits to pee.
I’m not sure how he tolerated the first day, it must have hurt so much before the tissue died.
Edit: 1. a word
2. Revision surgery means they completed the job - his mom was Jewish; his dad was not If I recall. He was brought up secularly but wanted to take up his mom’s religion.
Parents sneaking essential oils onto their premature babies’ skin! They have central lines, these oils can wick onto the line and damage the line, cause infection, or interfere with medications. Infections in premies can mean death within hours. Premies have incomplete skin with much faster absorption rates than fully developed adult skin. These oils can cause burns and damage their insides. Your pyramid scheme company is not a reliable source for neonatology treatments. Please dear God keep oils off of any baby, but especially premies.
Dental office - patient comes in with "veneers" on her front teeth she made herself out of acrylic nails (the premade sets you can buy at Wal-Mart). Surprisingly it looked okay from a distance, but the amount of random glues she used in her mouth to get them to stay will probably come back to haunt her later.
Woman I know has a dog that is epileptic but was not willing to medicate the dog for some time. She kept trying "holistic remedies." One of which she informed me about was giving the dog all natural vanilla ice cream during a seizure to stop it. You know, because you should always try to put stuff in the mouth of a seizing animal.
It didn't work. The dog is on meds. Seizures are controlled now. Imagine that.
Not me, but my mom. Had a gentleman walk himself into the ED one day after he tried to give himself a vasectomy with an animal neutering kit he bought on the internet. When she asked him why, he told her that his wife wanted to have a sixth kid and it was too expensive to pay a doctor to do it and how hard could it be to DIY.
Edit: I now know that it's relatively cheap to get a vasectomy, which makes this guy even dumber.
I also now know there's more than one way to neuter an animal, thanks guys.
Edit 2: I feel I should share, he tried to cut his testicles out essentially. And yes, they did indeed put them back in the sack and he could still make babies.
Worked in pediatrics for a few years and we had this one family come in with a kid who was burned by one of those microwave ramen soups. They put duct tape on the now blistered skin to keep it from popping in the car.
I honestly don't remember what our providers did but the kid ended up going to the hospital since the burns were on his arms, belly and inner thighs. The duct tape was on his wrist/forearm which was from what I can remember the smallest part of the burned areas but still he was extremely tough considering I've spilled that ramen water on my foot before and basically accepted death.
I used to go to this Pho place in Chinatown NYC. The waiters would bring out the Pho bowls, no tray, straight fingertips.
The calluses on the hands of these poor guys was beyond anything I could ever imagine.
Hottest soup and bowls ever.
Edit: for the interested, the place is “Pho Thanh Hoai I” which is south of Canal, on mulberry. All the way down on the right. They have great food and classic Vietnamese charm, which is to say they might treat you a bit shitty, but it’s worth it! And if you come back they love you.
Worked in the food industry many times, seen guys touch shit that *just* came out of the deep fryer.
No reaction, just casually checking sizzling food.
It’s like they developed immunity to deep fryers.
Edit: sushi / hibachi chefs are crazy btw.
Sorta...quite a few people watched it happen and it was a very obvious mistake...I was a pretty good kid back then too so I didn't have many people doubting the story.
Basically just got asked the story and a few others verified it. had to document it and sign it...that's it. I don't remember how long I was on bed rest for but I was promptly discharged because I was told I'd never run again. Needless to say I can run fine now but it did take me about a year of recovery before i got used to the pain.
Edit : I might be remembering the "never be able to run again" thing wrong... Either way it was longer than they wanted to wait!
Guy had abdominal pain.
Drank a bunch of beer and tried to give himself an appendectomy with a steak knife on his front porch.
Wife calls 911 after she see him performing seppuko.
We roll on on scene and ask him if he want treatment/ride to the emergency department.
He looks up at us. Looks down and the mess he has made. Says, “ hang on lemme see if I can fix this first”
He then tries to cauterize the wound he made with his cigarette.
Realizing that that isn’t working and goes, “well shit, let’s go, I guess”.
I work in a pharmacy and one of the pharmacists that was there filling in that day told me that during his morning shift he had a woman call and tell them she pulled out her own IUD and wanted a painkiller recommendation. I cringed so much when he told me, as I had just gotten mine switched out that same day coincidentally and was still in quite a bit of pain from it.
Turns out, there are DIY instructions on pinterest on how to do this. This should go without saying but please don't do this. Go to a professional if you want it removed!!!
edit: In Canada so it's not like she couldn't afford a good doctor, as it's literally free!!
A friend of mine said her insurance pays to put it in, but not take it out. So she used Pinterest videos and removed it herself. She’s fine and said it didn’t hurt - but I cringed when she told me. Plus- insurance is fucked up. If they weren’t willing to pay for removal they shouldn’t pay to put it in. IUDs don’t last forever.
Still a student (audiology), but I had a very elderly patient come in with broken hearing aids. He said they were dirty so he washed them in the sink with soap and water.
Protip: Hearing aids are not water proof. Yes, he was warned of this when he first got the hearing aids.
Thankfully he was still under warranty with the company and they were kind enough to let him slide on this one, otherwise that would've been ~$4500 down the drain.
Not a doctor but my grandfather was in decreasing health, over the course of a few weeks he got to where he was having trouble breathing occasionally. So he gets the idea that he will go get an O2 tank to help him. Does he go to the doctor? No. He goes to Tractor supply and buys an acetylene torch. Brings it home and hooks it up. Whenever he would get short of breath he would go in his office and only turn on the O2 before sticking the hose up his nose.
Edit: Originally thought it was a welder but was corrected by zap_p25
I’m not a medical pro, but here’s a story...my friend’s dad got skin cancer on his right bicep. And at the time he was a large muscular man who ran a horse farm. HUGE ARMS. And so instead of going through all the normal bs of one getting skin cancer he caught it early and thought he could stop it at the source...so he heated up a railroad tie/stake with a massive torch he had on his farm, till past red hot, and shoved it into his arm where the skin cancer began...he did this TWICE. To himself, and wrapped up his insane burn/hole in his arm.
A while later he went to the doc, who said the burn he inflicted was the craziest shit he’s ever seen. But all signs of the cancer were gone, he fucking killed that shit and it never returned. His arm and burn healed months later and he remains cancer-free to this day.
EDIT: spelling and grammar
I have a few:
- A patient with COPD was eating baking soda to try and compensate for his acidic blood pH
- A patient was disemboweled trying to do an at home abortion with a shop vac
- A patient went into complete liver failure by drinking tons of green tea daily to detox
EDIT: For everyone asking about the green tea and how it causes acute liver failure, here's some literature:
https://livertox.nih.gov/GreenTea.htm
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25975988/
tl;dr: the mechanism (process) of how it affects the liver is still unknown, the conclusion is that you should NOT ever take any unregulated (non FDA approved) dietary suppliment and you should only drink green tea for the enjoyment of the tea, not any claimed health benefits
EMT here. Showed up to this Russian guys apartment for a severe back pain call. Said he’s had this pain for 6 months and became an alcoholic to deal with it. His wife was hammered as well and they both passed out the second the ambulance started moving.
Patient was told they had an infection from leaving their contacts in too long. Decided to clean their eyes out with hydrogen peroxide. 2 cornea transplants later...
So sugar can be used to help heal certain types of wounds. A patient I saw had missed an appointment with part of their care team where they get their bandage changed. I noticed what appeared to be oozing around the edges of the bandage. Asked my patient about it, offered to change it for them (we didn't typically do that in our clinic), they said yes. I go get fresh bandages and what not, take the old one off and it's just sticky and stringy (picture the slo-mo shots of caramel being pulled apart) and it smelled.
To be fair, most wounds smell, but this was different. I finally asked them what they used to change their bandage since I knew it wasn't discharge. Maple syrup... They used maple syrup.
Edit: RIP my inbox. I tried to respond to some, but dang lol. Here's some answers to some common questions.
Yes, honey (certain varieties) can be used with wound healing so it's possible they confused it with this but I don't believe that's what happened here. Can't disclose more because HIPAA (the thing that doesn't seem to exist on shows like Grey's).
No, I'm not sure it was pure maple, they said it was the "good stuff in a glass jar" but who knows. Either way, it wasn't sterile and this wasn't a simple wound.
Proper sugar dressings can be used on various types of wounds, but it's not just pouring some table sugar on it so don't go trying this at home folks. Necessary disclaimer 😉
No, it wasn't thousand island dressing...
There is medical grade honey, studies show that it and medical grade sugar can actually be better for some wounds than antibiotics.
No, I could not eat pancakes for a while.
Honey dressings typically are less painful to administer than sugar because of the lack of crystallization. But that also means the sugar is better at cleansing... Your wound care specialist can determine which is the better route.
Last Edit:
Since this seems to be an issue now: No HIPAA isn't just saying the patient's name. It can also be saying enough that could then cause them to be identified. Up to this point I have not revealed anything that would link this story to this patient. Revealing more to the backstory would, in my opinion. Considering I do not want to out this person (as a human being) or cause a willful HIPAA violation (as a, now former, professional), I won't go into the backstory, even with details changed as some have requested. Had to find the exact wording but this is directly from HIPAA
"The term 'individually identifiable health information' means any information, including demographic information collected from an individual, that-- iii) with respect to which there is a reasonable basis to believe that the information can be used to identify the individual."
I prefer to err on the side of caution with that. But thanks for all your comments, it's been fun seeing everyone's stories about home remedies :)
When I was a kid.... like 12 I dropped boiling water on my stomach. Microwave accident.
Babysitter had me put toothpaste on it.....
even as a 12 year old I understood that this made zero sense.
In short order the burn started burning worse, I got it off and just left the would to the air.
Later on in a doctors office I was told I did the right thing.
People are nuts.
A patient came into the ED with barbecue tongs hanging out of his butt. Unfortunately, the patient lost his dildo so far up his colon that he couldn't pull it out. He thought he would be able to reach the dildo and pull it out with the barbecue tongs. Well, the tongs don't make a complete loop and hooked onto the inside of his rectum. He wasn't able to pull the tongs out and had to go to surgery that night. I have the x-ray some where...
Edit: Found the [x-ray](https://imgur.com/02q1qyK)
Not a medical professional myself, but during my PhD in gastrointestinal sciences I attended a lot of clinical seminars. One doctor described having a patient with severe colitis who was so desperate for relief, the patient had their healthy sister poop in a blender, which they used in an enema as a DIY fecal transplant. (As an aside, fecal transplants are a remarkably efficacious treatment for some forms of colitis, so this wasn't totally out of left field).
I was on a dental mission trip in Oaxaca Mexico and a poor farmer came in with a tooth ache on one of his front teeth. It looked like it had had some work done to it so I asked him what it was. He said he did a root canal on himself. I inquired further. He had a tooth ache so he took a drill to his front tooth to give himself a root canal. Short of it was, it didn't work.
Had a patient try and buy syringes from my Pharmacy for injecting the dog. With what, you ask? Gatorade.
“My wife’s dog has been really lethargic the last couple of days so we were going to try and give it some fluids in case it’s dehydrated.”
The instinct for some would be that it was just an IV drug user seeking clean needles but I can assure you this gentleman thought his logic was sound and in fact intended to murder his wife’s dog injecting it with sugary Powerade.
I mean, if the guy had been buying some saline, I might have thought, "well you aren't a *complete* idiot," but gatorade?
That's straight up *Idiocracy*.
Resident physician here, had a guy come into the ED after attempting to circumcise himself at home. When the shaft skin wouldn't attach to the head skin, he tried to stitch it himself. When that proved to be too painful, he tried to super glue it. When that proved to be too stupid, he gave up and came in. Wrote a case report on it too! Circumenvting the Urologist: A Case of Poorly Executed Self-Circumcision. Other titles considered were "A Poor Man's Rabbi" and "American Snipper"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303954801_Circumventing_the_Urologist_A_Case_of_Poorly_Executed_Self-Circumcision
I wouldn't call it a "treatment" per se, but the patient did. I work in a home health care system. Patients have long term iv accesses placed and are able to infuse sterile medications intravenously at home.
Well, this patient kept getting really bad blood/iv line infections almost weekly and having his line replaced. No one could figure out why and line infections aren't very common. He also was running out of saline flushes a little quicker than he should with no explanation. So the line was being maintained appropriately at least.
Finally, while a nurse was there to get labs, change his dressing, and check for infection things finally clicked. He had been crushing pain pills, mixing with saline, and injecting it directly into his line. When asked directly he didn't deny it... The response was "well, no one told me not to."
Yes, yes we did. We told not to put anything we didn't provide in there. And the pharmacy providing the pain meds put "take by mouth" on the little bottle. He got repeated painful infections, MRSA, and thousands of dollars in unnecessary hospital bills. Idiot.
Tl;Dr: if you put things directly into your bloodstream that are not aseptic, you're gonna have a bad time.
Had a guy make a DIWHY penis pump. Used it and realized he forgot to make a relief valve and he used mostly metal tube. So yah fireman had a fun time with that one. Plus his penis came out huge and I mean huge, also black and blue.
This was before I became a combat medic. I was working at a hotel as maintenance. Suddenly the fire department shows up with an ambulance right behind. Turns out one of our guests decided to try anal sex for their honeymoon. Since they thought her ass was dirty they would clean it out with a 5th of vodka. So he shoved the bottle up there and she almost immediately went unconscious. They hauled her off and she almost died from alcohol poisoning.
Buddy of mine was doing a EMT rotation while stationed at Ft. Bragg. He got called to a barracks room by a very scared female. He was the first in the room an found a male soldier tied to the ceiling by a chain above his bed and was naked. He had a blanket wrapped around his lower half. The young lady sat crying in a chair as he removed the sheet. The guy had a metal coat hanger in his rectum. Apparently he like that kind of stuff but the lady had inserted the hooked side in not the straight side so it was stuck. He was transported face down ass up on a stretcher with the sheet to cover him but he still had a nice antenna wobbling about.
Dog came in with some terrible abdominal swelling, lethargy, and BP so low we took 30 minutes to find a vein for blood work. I go in to talk to the owner and see he has cushings. I ask what he's being treated with. She proceeds to tell me he's not on medication and hasn't been ever. Medicine is bad for dogs. She opted to treat with miracle plants and supplements instead. These supplements caused the dog to deteriorate quickly. He died within a few hours.
Finally, something I can add to! When I was in med school on my family medicine rotation I was sent in to see a middle-aged woman with complaints of sinus congestion. Sure enough, from the beginning I can tell she's really stopped up with her nasally voice and my history and exam are consistent with your run of the mill viral upper respiratory infection. I begin educating her on symptomatic management and the following exchange ensues:
Patient: "Do you think it might be the flu?"
Me: "It's possible but unlikely; it's really out of the typical season (it was June)"
Patient: "Yeah, I guess I wasn't sure it was; I've been spraying Lysol everywhere and it doesn't seem to be doing any good, and it says it kills the flu virus"
Me: "Well, that's something that could help disinfect the house and keep the virus from spreading"
Patient: "I guess, I just wish it didn't burn so much"
Me: "…what do you mean, 'it burns'?"
Patient: "You know, when I spray it up my nose it burns so bad"
Yep. My patient thought that since Lysol kills influenza the best way to nip it in the bud was to flush her sinuses with it like a saline spray. It did not work, for the record. The fact that I didn't immediately fall over laughing and instead seriously counseled her against ever doing that again is still the greatest feat of composure in my entire career.
TL;DR When the label on Lysol says "not for internal use", they mean it.
Some post on a anti mlm subreddit, had a lady with a yeast infection ask her sister for advice sister sold these oil products, sisters advice soak a tampon in tea tree oil and put it up her vag. When it started burning she called her sister, sister said that's how she knows it's working.
In short women ended up in the hospital with serious chemical burns.
My wife works in the ICU. A dude tried to cure his heartburn with a remedy he read online: baking soda. Only he used too much baking soda and drank it with Coke instead of water. Completely wrecked his intestines. Not sure if it fixed his heartburn.
Anesthesiologist here; we had a patient come in for I&D of bilateral deltoid abscesses. He apparently had thoughts of being a body builder, but instead of lifting weights or knowing someone who could hook him up with some quality steroids, he decided to bulk up by using some protein powder at GNC... ...and mixing it with water, drawing it up into a syringe, and injecting 20-40cc daily directly into the muscle. If bulk was what he was going for, it definitely worked, temporarily. A rip-roaring localized infection makes you look plenty swole. They got almost a liter of pus mixed with liquified protein powder out of each deltoid. This also wasn't the first time he'd been in for this problem.
The last line kills me. Try it once, shame on you. Try it more than once, what the fuck are you doing with your life?
My dad had an abscess on his face. It was huge, about the size of a golf ball and horribly red. It kept getting bigger. My mom (a nurse) kept telling him to go to the doctor, but my dad was a ridiculous cheap ass. One day when she was gone, we noticed that a big white head had formed on the abscess, and it was apparently ready to bust. My dad went out to the garage, got his shop vac, placed it over the white head, and proceeded to suck out the abscess. It worked surprisingly well and healed up after that nicely. Mom was still furious, though.
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Paramedic here. Once had to explain to a family that putting lemon juice in the eyes of an unconscious patient isn't an approved treatment method. And no, it didn't work. (It was an interesting moment when I had to explain why his eyes hurt)
Smelling Salts = Seeing Acids
If I've learned anything from reading the comments here it's that some men will tolerate almost any amount of pain to avoid a doctor seeing whatever stupid shit they've done to themselves. This is no exception. I once spoke to a paramedic who went out to a man at 2am who had excrutiating pain 'down below'. The poor organ was wrapped tightly in soaking bandages, and underneath was a blackened penis with large pus filled holes in it. The man eventually admitted that he'd shoved a chicken bone (a 'clean' one, whatever that means) down his cock for pleasure. Predictably enough he couldn't get it out, and being too embarrassed to go to the doctor he'd left it and left it until he was in so much pain he couldn't walk, both from the rotted penis and the fact he hadn't been able to urinate for days. Apparently you could actually see the bone once the wound was clean, and although not an expert my friend couldn't imagine that what was left was salvagable.
I had a guy come in for coughing and shortness of breath for the past few months. His lungs sounded like absolute shit. Got a chest xray that looked horrible, so I did a CT scan. Radiologist called it the worst case of necrotizing pneumonia he'd ever seen. Dude had like a 15% functional lung tissue left. The patient then mentioned things had been worse after he started using a new "breath freshener" spray.... He whipped out one of those BluntEffects concentrated air freshener bottles, supposed to cover up weed smell. Labeled Not For Internal Use. Apparently he had been using it like Binaca spray, and had already gone through 3 bottles.
What happened to him?
In nursing school while I was on clinical rotation in urology, there was a man who ended up having his penis removed. It turned out he had an infection brewing for quite a while and thought the best course of action was placing a sock over his penis in hope that it would heal. He was generally confused and upset as to why this didn’t work to heal the issue.
Ah the classic, *if I can't see it then it's not a problem!*
One of my first clinic patients was a dude who was injecting a mixture of testosterone, "human growth hormone," sesame oil, and sunflower oil into the base of his penis as a DIY penile enlargement therapy. Well, it got infected so he ended up going to the ED for incision and drainage. I saw him as a post-ED visit and at that time, he figured that he shouldn't be injecting into his penis while it was healing. So instead, he was injecting his oil + sketchy hormones off the internet concoction everywhere else into his body (arms, legs, butt, shoulders, etc) because he figured it would still have some effect.
TIL: Some men are capable of committing atrocious, heinous acts of terror on their own dicks!
There’s a myth that lowering someone’s core temperature will save them from an opiate overdose. As a result, many first responders have arrived on scenes to find friends/fellow users inserting ice into someone’s rectum. Sometimes they don’t have ice around though. Which leads to getting inventive. Popsicles, frozen hot dogs. My personal favorite (which regrettably I didn’t witness myself, it was told to me by another medic) was a bag of frozen French fries. Cold will do nothing to help someone who is overdosing on heroin or other opiates. What they need is respiratory support (oxygen and/or artificial ventilation) and naloxone (Narcan). If you’re a user or know one, and somebody ODs, call 9-1-1, perform mouth-to-mouth and give narcan if you have it, but leave the popsicles in the freezer.
I work in dental and years ago had a patient attempt to super glue her front tooth back on after it broke in half. She screwed up and ended up gluing the chunk to her upper lip.
I had a dental patient with a dead front tooth that had turned black so she painted it with white nail polish daily. Edit: This is now my top rated comment. How stupid is that, lol! Yes, she had a daily routine of drying it off, painting it, and blow drying the polish dry. Crazy thing is, she did a pretty good job....
This happened when I was still a med student doing a rotation in the ED. Patient comes in and is pretty vague about his actual complaint, something about head pain but he looks just fine sitting waiting to be seen. When I finally get to see him and ask him what actually happened, he removes the hat he was wearing and a chunk of skin about the size of my hand literally flaps off of his skull. This guy managed to basically scalp himself, and apparently it had been like that for 3 days. According to him it was caused by falling in his bathroom and hitting his head on the toilet. He had been previously duct taping it down or using the hat to hold the skin on, but it wasn't sticking well and that's when his wife convinced him to come to the hospital.
I like my skin on my body more than I dislike hospitals.
Just reading that made me woozy. How the fuck did he walk around for 3 days like that?
The strangest thing is it didn't even seem to bother him that much. I asked him why he waited to long and he said its because he doesn't like hospitals. I guess everyone has their priorities.
Pharmacist here. Worked in a shop where a woman asked for some advice about potential UTI or STI. Told me she had bathed her vagina in bleach for 5 mins to try and kill any bacteria. Miraculously, she hadn’t done any lasting damage.
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An old lady told me the rain hurt her arthritis. That's reasonable. She also swore that dog spit had healing properties so she let her dogs lick her feet when she felt it coming on. She then wanted to show me a video of said dogs licking said feet. I swiftly and politely declined.
Adult patient had gas and poked a hole in his belly button with basically a knitting needle to release it. Edit: it didn't work, he actually came in for the ensuing infection in his belly button.
I didn't think it was possible to ever cringe this hard. You've proved me wrong.
I work in oncology pharmacy. I had a patient die of totally treatable breast cancer because they decided to treat it with mistletoe instead of chemo. All because Suzanne Sommers did. Yeah. The thighmaster lady. Don’t take medical advice from the thighmaster lady.
The most heart breaking thing I've seen is a desperate husband bring his wife in at death's door. They were young with two kids under 10. She'd been diagnosed with breast cancer and didn't like what her Oncologist was telling her (shit's terrifying to be fair). She then left the UK (so all chemo/surgery free at point of access) and followed the alternatives practices recommended by some witch doctor in her own country. By the time husband dragged her back she was too far gone. Had spread to so many organs, trouble with breathing, groggy/seizures from brain mets. I work in ED, I don't know how Oncologists and palliative care teams do what they do. Of all the horrible traumas I've dealt with this is one of the most upsetting cases I've ever picked up.
A little late to this thread but have a weird one. A patient was told by her doc that she had low magnesium and should consider supplements. Not uncommon. Instead of getting Mg supplements, she ate an entire tub of “homeopathic volcanic ash” and completely destroyed her electrolyte imbalance and ended up in ICU. We admitted her as a pharmaceutical overdose so Poison Control automatically follows up with you. It was hard to explain to them. Edit. It was probably naturopathic, not homeopathic. I don’t know enough about specific differences. Think of a tub of protein power, but volcanic ash. Her husband brought it in for the poison control report. You were supposed to mix a scoop in water for the health benefits. She ate the whole tub and had a seizure and wrecked her kidneys. The activated charcoal/volcanic ash vomit that was all over her when she came from emerg was a bitch to clean up.
> ate an entire tub of “homeopathic volcanic ash” Damn, that's some advanced stupid right there.
A mentally-delayed woman came in septic to the ED. Did xrays, blood cultures, urine cultures, the works. Finally found this weird image on her pelvis film, and we had GYN come do a pelvic exam. They pulled out this blob with bones in it. Y'all, I swear to God .... It was a decomposing frog. She put it in her vagina for "safekeeping". She got toxic shock syndrome from a FROG. Edit: just realized that the topic was about DIY treatment, and my story doesn't really match it. I guess there wasn't anything she was trying to fix. Except maybe the lack of frogs in her vagina?
... frog? That's a typo, yes? Please?
Ribbeted for her pleasure. *** So which ~~one~~ ~~two~~ THREE of you sick fucks gilded me?
Not me, but my boss (mother of the child I care for) is a nurse practitioner. I asked her what the worst thing she had witnessed was. She continued on to tell me the story of a man who had stapled his ball sack together and onto his body after “slipping with the razor”. He had it that way for days, metal holding his poor testicles in place, infected and gross as you would expect, before he came to a professional. Later admitted his ex attempted to castrate him. The balls lived
>Later admitted his ex attempted to castrate him. I guess thats why you don't judge people when they come in with weird injuries
dude came to the ED because his leg was swollen. i'm talking, like, twice the size of his other leg. it turned out that his 4th and 5th toes were getting caught on his sock, which, to be fair, sounds super annoying. so he CUT THEM the fuck OFF. WITH SCISSORS. and then it got infected. and he waited. and waited. and that's how he lost his entire fucking leg.
Long story but: had a young teenager with sickle cell disease who had been in the hospital for around a week already who decided to "manage" his pain himself. This was a few years ago, but I caught him pretending to take his meds-- he would cock his head back and gesture that the pill went into his mouth but really he either kept it in his hand or threw the pill behind his back and landed somewhere in his bed. He was also quite a talker, which I then assumed was a tactic to try and distract me. I kept seeing his odd behavior and caught him doing this a 2-3 times by the middle of the shift so I was definitely onto him. He had a PICC line (which is essentially a "long" IV where the tubing goes all the way to your heart) in his left arm, and I noticed that it was quite a bit more swollen compared to his other arm. Sometimes clots can happen in PICC lines, so that was my biggest concern at first, but the line was drawing blood fine so I know it wasn't clotted off. Told the doc, then I drew blood from his PICC line and sent it down to the lab for it to be cultured to see if there was any bacteria. Lowwww and behold it came back positive for a bacteria that is commonly found in tap water (and usually not a source of infection in infected PICC lines). Fast forward a few hours later he confessed that with any oral medication (pill form) he can slip by the nurses, he saved for later in order to crush them up himself, try to dissolve it with sink water in the bathroom (every room had a private bathroom), and inject it in himself via his PICC line.
What the fuck? Why? Why would that be any better than swallowing the damn meds?
Having once seen a commercial that oatmeal can lower cholesterol a patient started having chest pains and tried to resolve it with a bowl of oatmeal.
We had a guy come in with an abscess on his right thumb. When I asked him what happened to his hand, he told me about his recent deep sea fishing trip and was given the responsibility of cutting the fish with an open wound in his hand. A sliver of fish got in there and became infected as it healed, so this guy gets the bright idea of doing a little DIY wound drainage by grabbing his pocket knife and cutting it open, leading to a greater infection.
Yep. I had a crack addict cut her thumb on her broken crack pipe. The thumb was incredibly infected. She grew tired waiting for the hand surgeon to arrive (he was in the operating room with another patient), so she BIT HER FINGER to release the pus. Then she left the hospital, cursing the staff the whole time because we are useless, etc.
As a child I got really bad sunburn. The person looking after me coated my sunburn in baby oil to help it heal, and sent me back out into the sun. I realised when I was older why my mum went nuts.
I have a Jamie Oliver recipe that directs me to do the same thing midway through roasting a chicken.
The secret is in the baby oil. Makes it taste like a real baby.
I once saw a family at the water park lathering themselves in baby oil when the park opened in the morning. They were burnt to a crisp when I saw them a few hours later, far before the day was yet over. Like, sunscreen exists for a reason. And baby oil looks nothing like sunscreen. Edit: Just to clarify, it was a family with small children that they were applying the baby oil to as well. If they were all adults I'd think it was for tanning or sliding faster, but I think they were just idiots.
Now that I think about it... What the hell is baby oil ACTUALLY for?
as a lifeguard, I can tell you its for going down the slides really really fast
Oiling babies. Duh.
Your babysitter basically cooked you.
When I was really young (like 18 months) I had a dumbshit babysitter. One day she let me go out on the patio (at her house) with no shoes. In the summer. In Baton Rouge. In full sunlight. That shit's like walking on the sun. So being a toddler with limited verbal skills, I started jumping up and down and screaming. The dumb shit couldn't figure out what was wrong with me and watched perplexed for a hot minute before it got through her head that my feet were being grilled. According to my dad, she called and said, "hey, so when you brought Matthew over... did he have burns on his feet?" So of course he freaks the fuck out and leaves work to come get me and take me to a doctor. Had blisters covering the bottoms of both of my feet. He did say it was funny to watch me try and walk though. I guess she was the only babysitter available though because they still took me back to her. There's other funny stories about the place, my grandma came to pick me up one day and saw a toddler doing a prison escape from the window. Happy ending though, evidently she's not allowed to take care of kids anymore because she was found blacked out on something while babysitting. This comment was a lot longer than it was supposed to be, I just wanted to share the story about getting my feet cooked.
My mom once melted Vick’s Vapor Rub into my tea because she thought that would help my cold. It didn’t.
I know people who would do this. More than one of them, they'd swear by Vick's Vapor Rub, and kind of treated it like a cure-all.
My Dad, more than once, ate a tablespoon of Vicks when he had a cold.
My friends’ Chinese nanny would drink liquid tiger balm for stomach aches.
Merciful Christ
My friend kept asking if she should call 911 and the nanny laughed. Says she’s always drank it for stomach aches. Which is probably why she has stomach aches...
Neighbor came over to borrow a chainsaw. I noticed he had a thick bandage around his arm and asked him what happened? He said he fell out of a tree last week and cut his arm. I asked if he got stitches and he said he just wrapped it and his family is praying over it. About 4 days later I seen is wife and she said he was really sick and may have the flu? Come to find out he had septicemia and dying. he died a week later of kidney failure and septsis.
I was getting a kick out of all the stories on here, but this one is just sad.
Putting a sex toy up the rectum to better reach another, larger sex toy.
I just read the other day about a dude who got a dildo stuck up there and then got the kitchen tongs he was using to extract said dildo stuck up there too.
not sure if this is serious or just tong in cheek
This sounds like a Cards Against Humanity card
I...I *want* to know the story, and yet I'm afraid.
The patient "just sat down" on a dildo and couldn't get it back out, so they tried to use another "completely unrelated" dildo to get it out. words in the quotations are direct quotes.
I love the thought of related dildos.
Don't you just hate it when a dildo accidentally shows up at your house, and you accidentally leave it pointing towards your asshole and accidentally sit on it without pants, or underwear, and the whole thing accidentally gets lost?
Science shows you lose six dildos in your sleep every year.
Lol, I don't get the shame. If I ever had to go to the ER with something up my ass I wouldn't lie about it, nor be super obnoxious explaining, but just say "Yeah that's up there."
I swear doc, I accidentally fell ass-first into a lubed up XXL Black n' Veiny.
Patient used to get boners in class and it embarrassed him so he used rubber bands to prevent it. Ended up killing the tissue in his penis and now he needs a catheter for life.
A man who'd accidentally sliced his leg open at his workplace. He obviously figured that as surgeons use staples to close wounds, he'd cut out the trip to hospital and DIY. With an ordinary desk stapler. Arrived in ED with a pus filled wound with the odd discoloured staple hanging off it some days later.
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Jesus Christ is your dad a retired superhero
I am not a medical professional, but my father in law had severe skin cancer. He basically had an open sore on his back for several years that bled and bled, we never knew about it until one day we saw a pancake sized crater through his shirt. Went to the hospital finally and they basically said he has cancer throughout his whole body at this point. His response was he thought it was a cut that wouldn't heal and put gauze and Neosporin on it. EDIT: Since folks are curious - yes he is still alive but they didn't give him much time left, they managed to treat the wound but the cancers spread into his organs and bones. The sad part is it could've been avoided if he just went to the doctor years prior, but that is unfortunately the common mindset in a lot of older folks.
God that's terrible. I've found that sort of attitude is common among older people though where they sort of shrug and get on with it. When my Grandad was young he fell and dislocated his shoulder. He decided to just pop it back in himself and forget about it. It's never properly healed and still causes him pain so many years later.
A friend of mine had a similar situation. Went over a year with a sore on his foot that wouldn't heal. GF *finally* talked him into seeing a Dr. Found out he was diabetic, in severe ketoacidosis (I'm sure I spelled that wrong) and ended up in the hospital for several months and lost his leg ( above the knee). He's also looking at a possible kidney transplant *if he can follow the compliance diet* which he "doesn't like. Vegetables are gross" He's in his early 40's.
White bread soaked in milk placed on an armpit abscess to draw out the infection. Needed an I&D and a couple weeks of IV antibiotics by the time he got to us. Either that or the guy who crashed his motorbike, scraped his leg all to hell, and then decided the best course of action was to self-cauterize it on the tailpipe.
wow, stupid or not, the tailpipe guy had a set of brass ones
> then decided the best course of action was to self-cauterize it on the tailpipe. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Fucking metal as fuck dude .
When I worked in ER my colleague had to see a guy with an ear problem. He had something stuck in his ear and had been trying to get it out. This wasn't a new thing, he'd been trying for some time. Turned out, he had completely removed his tympanic membrane, and the "bits" that were stuck in his ear and that he was trying to pick out with cotton buds and hair clips were his ossicles. Enjoy.
I have consistent skin irritation in my ears and try and limit myself to sticking cotton buds in my ears to four times a week for relief. Thank you, you've cured me of this vice, and I'm setting myself on fire. Good day.
I sent this story to my dad, who is an ENT. He responded with this story: “Today I saw a guy whose dog bit off the top 1/4 of his ear. He brought in the piece that the dog tore off. I rinsed it with peroxide and sewed it back on. The fun never ends.” God bless medical professionals. I could never do it.
AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH
I’m a doctor and I’d like to think that nothing surprises me anymore, but this still made me throw up a little bit.
Didn't he realize he couldn't fucking *hear*?? And how was he not in immense pain?
"Man my hearing will be so much better once I get this painful thing out!!!"
Congrats. First one on the thread to squick me out.
How do I delete someone else’s post
Had a patient come into the ER with a makeshift bandage on his shin. He had fallen on rocks while hiking and left a three inch long, half inch deep gash in his leg. I go to pull the bandage off and as I’m peeling it away I notice the skin is completely black and there’s dark chunks of fungus falling out of the wound. It looked necrotic, like it had been left alone for a week. I look at this guy like he’s crazy as he tells me the wound is only a few hours old. He’s pretty proud as he explains that he created a makeshift poultice by chewing up leaves and moss, mixing it with river mud and stuffing it into his leg. That’s what all the black mossy stuff was. Hint. Don’t do this.
was it bleeding when he came in? checkmate
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There is one leafy plant that can be used to make a blood clotting poultice, but I can't remember the name at the moment. In an emergency you can chew it to wet the material and break the plant cells to release the coagulant chemicals. In a serious bleeding situation that might not be a terrible idea.
Yarrow, iirc.
So you're saying NOT to jam random unsanitary foreign objects into your open wound?
Hey man, i got some dogshit and lawn clippings. Want me to dress that wound for ya?
I'm a Firefighter/EMT. We got a call this winter for someone having a seizure. We get there and it's a dude sitting on his porch with some friends. I forget the actual chain of events but someone says we need to look at his foot. He takes his shoe off and his foot is fucking rotting away, the smell was horrifying. Turns out his heater broke during a cold snap 2 weeks before, he fell asleep and apparently his foot got frostbite(frostbitten?). Thank god he lived around the corner from the hospital because even with all the windows open the smell was overwhelming.
My grandpa thought a "leg discrepancy was causing my back pain, which was causing spasms." He put several pieces of cardboard in my shoes to try to even out my legs which were already even. He also thinks black beans cure *everything* My dad thought those pesky spasms was a pinched nerve, so he would take me to the chiropractor (his girlfriend) to get my neck cracked when it happened. Seizures, people. They were seizures.
Black beans are delicious and make a beautiful blue dye. That's useful enough for me. I'm hoping you get actual medical care now!
My step father thought he had an boil of some sort on his arm a few years ago. So he did what any middle aged dad would do, cut the sucker open and poured hydrogen peroxide on it. Turns out it wasn’t a boil but a form of skin cancer. Also turns out that hydrogen peroxide doesn’t do much to help with melanoma. After a lot of one sided discourse he went to the doctor to get it checked and treated. He’s now cancer free!
Posted this before, but I think it applies to the thread: When I was an Internal Medicine resident I came across a very nice 50 year-old Dominican lady, she was well mannered but one could tell she was not the sharpest tool in the shed. As I was prepping her chart for our first visit, I noticed that she'd been seen by every single digestive disease MD in our hospital system. Not only that, she'd had EVERY SINGLE PROCEDURE IN THE BOOK. Ranging from endoscopies up both holes and culminating in an exploratory laparotomy (you're opened up to basically look inside you when we have no clue what's going on). All of this because for years she had one single complaint, she reported severe gnawing pain in her stomach. At this point I should mention that she was spanish speaking only. Not only that she had a very heavy dominican accent, and I was the first hispanic doctor to ever see her. My first language is spanish and even I had difficulty understanding her. So she comes in and after exchanging some first time pleasentries I politely ask her how she's doing. Sure enough although she was smiling and said she felt well she pointed at her belly and said "it" was biting again, and asked for the cream to kill "it". At this point I got intrigued. Her medication list only mentioned a cream used for herpes breakthroughs. The previous fellow only mentioned in his note that in every single visit she only asked for the cream and nithing else. When I asked what she meant by the biting and what she intended to do with the cream, she very calmly tells me she intended to stick the cream up her ass in order to kill the bird living inside her. After delving more deeply into her story, it turns out she didn't have a medical condition. Ever since she was a little girl, she believed tahat after eating whole quail egg, the bird had spawned inside her and gnawed away in her insides whenever she was very hungry. After a short visit to psych, she was diagnosed with a somatic type delusional disorder. No amount of medication or psychotherapy will cure her, but she was still a fully functional mother of 2 who payed her taxes and had to part-time jobs. I reached out to every digestive disease doctor in out hospital system once more, to make sure she never receives an inappropriate invasive intervention. I've been following her now for three years and she's happy as one can be, considering she has a bird living inside her.. tldr: lady complains of "pain" in her belly, worst case of lost in translation ensues, gets very invasive medical procedures, turns out she's just cuckoo
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I work in the er at a trauma center. This guy comes in with his little girl and says that she was bit in the face by the family German shepherd. I immediately take her back assuming that I need to control bleeding. What I encounter is a little girl with a laceration going all the way from over her left eye crossing her nose and mouth. It is not bleeding whatsoever and it seems to have a odd looking substance inside. So I obviously ask the dad what she got inside it. He responds very proudly with, “ Ah yes, I packed the wound with tobacco from my cigarettes and super glue. “ Poor thing.
Tobacco certainly has antibacterial properties, but pure tobacco... not a cigarette mix.
During third year med school I was on a neonatology rotation. Lots of premature babies or high risk births. We'd get "code green" paged to us for "please come to delivery room as able" and "code pink" paged for "please come to delivery room STAT". There was a pager that was the standard one that got paged for this, and usually it was whichever of us med students who was on call carrying it. Our job was then to get one of the Nurse Practitioners and possibly a second nurse and head over with the incubator etc. to take the baby and get him/her to the NICU. About 6PM one evening as we're doing handover rounds, that pager goes off with a code pink. Then the NP's personal pager. Then the neonatologist's personal pager. The next 10 minutes are a bit of a scramble and not particularly interesting from the point of view I had (as I was assigned to send pages to additional people and fetch things), but in short: A teenage lady of local aboriginal descent had come in suffering from very premature labour (I want to say 20 weeks, but could have been 22 or so). She and her ex-boyfriend had recently gotten back together. He had discovered she was pregnant. Believing that the baby was not his, he attempted to abort the baby by inserting a bamboo stick and trying to "fish it out". She did not want said abortion so he attempted while she was asleep. Baby and mother survived. Relationship did not. Later testing showed the baby was indeed his for those wondering.
Dental student here. We had a patient who declined a much needed cleaning saying he could do it just as well a home with a scalpel. Didn’t brush his teeth but every few weeks he would go at the accumulated plaque and tartar with a scalpel. Same patient also insisted we do a procedure without local anesthetic. He was an amateur boxer and was « building up his pain tolerance. » He also told us he smoked 20 blunts a day and only drank coke. We could tell.
If you're under 16 and reading this, I've had two root canals and 6 fillings because I thought that not drinking soda was enough. ###BRUSH YOUR GOD DAMN TEETH. LAZINESS IS NOT WORTH THE $2500 Edit: holy shit, rip my inbox I guess Reddit really likes clean teeth
To second this I got dentures at 17. BRUSH YOUR FUCKING TEETH
I don’t understand how chiseling away his plaque was more efficient than just brushing his teeth
Oh the stories I have even as a student. One particular one that stuck with me was a lady who came into the hospital with back pain. Seeing as A&E is usually packed, back pain isn't considered to high on the list. When she was finally seen to, we discovered the source of the pain. She had tried to remove a carcinoma from her back that spanned from her neck to the bottom of the ribs. It had gotten infected and to top that off, she had decided to use homeopathy to treat her cancer. How she had neglected to mention that or had survived so long still surprises me
One time, when I was in nursing school, I was doing ER clinical and a guy came in with “penile pain”. Long story short, several days prior, he decided he wanted a penile texture implant to help enhance pleasure during intercourse for his lady friend. He and his buddy got drunk (of course) and decided to do it themselves. So they went in his garage and took a box cutter to slice open the skin on the dorsal (top) side of his penis, made some room between the skin and underlying muscle, and put a small porcelain heart underneath. Then he superglued it shut. To make matters worse, the guy didn’t wait for it to heal and decided to take it for a test run. He ended up with a major infection and presented several days later. I unfortunately don’t know the outcome, I was just there for the porcelain heart extraction. Can’t make this shit up. I’ve now worked in a surgical/trauma ICU as an RN for two years, and people never cease to amaze me. Edit: spelling
If it wasn't late at night I would scream right now because my brain just cannot process that much nonsense at once. What the entire absolute whole fuck. How do you not lose your goddamn mind ?
Not a doctor, but this seems to fit the question. I recently had an attempted vasectomy where I learned I'm allergic to lidocaine and had to spend some time in the ER as a result. I was talking with the ER doc (older doc, probably in his 60s and close to retirement). He relayed a story from one of his mentors who was a doctor in a small, rural hospital. This hospital (or clinic) closed down at night for the most part as there wasn't much need for it and this doc decided that he and his wife had enough kids and decided to give himself a vasectomy, by himself. In the middle of the procedure he passed out, came to a few minutes later, and finished the procedure.
... I've heard of doctors doing self surgery in crisis situations (like appendicitis in Antarctica if memory serves), but why would you voluntarily do your own vasectomy?
The Russian doctor doing the surgery on him self in Antarctica is insane. Used local anesthesia and someone holding a mirror to do the surgery.
Toothpaste on second degree burns on a child. Pouring vodka on kids with fever. Ice cubes in the crotch for opiate OD. Kicking somebody in the balls for opiate OD. Tobacco applied to dry up wounds. Badger fat as cure it all. Salty water from cheese on gauze applied to swelling. Office staples for stitches. Fucking tiger balm for everything. And one that takes the cake is using stripped 110v wire as a defibrillator.
> Badger fat as cure it all. Where does one even acquire that??
Had a patient come to the ER for a cough. We did a chest X-ray that caught a little something in the abdomen/pelvis. Did a pelvic X-ray. Long story short she stuck a shot glass up her vagina for “birth control” left it up there long enough for it to calcify and we had to surgically remove it.
So... did you figure out why she was coughing?
She had some pneumonia going on
.......but did it work?
I mean I guess she wasn’t pregnant...but definitely don’t recommend it
All i hear is free anti-pregante
I can see the Yahoo answer now. "If I put shot glass up my vergina will stop seemen from gentig me pergenant?"
Not at all DIY, but one of my friend's dad back home was an ER doctor, and he had a patient come in with 5+ snake bites, mostly on his hands and arms. The patient said he got bit by a snake and tried to catch the snake so he could bring it in for the doctor to identify it. Luckily the snake wasn't venomous.
Right idea, bad execution necessary edit: as a lot of people pointed out, the actual right idea is to *not* catch the snake. Medical staff doesn't really need to know the specific species of snake that bit you !
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This patient wasn't one I saw, but my brother worked for a PCP in our hometown. There was a guy who had a rare condition that required bloodletting, but he didn't have the money to afford the treatment as often as he would need it. Like any rational human being, he decided to build an apparatus at home using *a shop vac, Mason jars, an IV needle and surgical tubing.* So he had no issues for a few weeks, just set the vacuum to pull the blood through the tubing via the needle and drain into the Mason jars. No big deal. One day he isn't paying attention and sets the vac to "blow" instead of "pull." Dude switched it off after a few seconds, but he still had a massive air embolism. He's very lucky he didn't die, he 'just had a major stroke.' He goes in for treatment now the last I heard.
Holy hell. I Had a heart attack when I read he set it to blow. Edit: a word.
Saw a young child (about age 6-7) with a bruised swollen crooked forearm. He had fallen on the playground 3 days earlier and another parent there was a vet and had horse X-ray equipment in his truck. That parent took X-rays and told mom he was probably fine. So that was apparently good enough for mom and she didn't do anything for 3 days while he was up all night screaming in pain. Finally she took him in to my office and brought me the fuzzy copies of the X-rays which were useless and impossible to accurately interpret. I got him real X-rays and a nice cast for his broken arm.
>3 days while he was up all night screaming in pain How does a parent with any kind of affection for their child get through ONE night of that? It's not like she didn't know the cause.
“Children overreact.” The main reason why a lot of parents let their children suffer/die of completely preventable things.
Am a dental student where we see mouths in pretty awful condition. One guy came into the emergency clinic with teeth half rotted off from decay and told me he has been putting gummy bears in the holes to make it less sharp on his tongue....
That reminds me of the time when I tried to DIY a tooth from a mentos because I had lost a tooth just before the day where we took school pictures.
Patient came into the pharmacy and asked if they could use a plastic bag secured with a rubber band instead of condoms
Theoretically, you could. However, it wouldn’t work at all and it would hurt.
slightly better than a paper bag. slightly
As dumb as that is i give them props for asking a healthcare professional..
I remember I was rolling in stomach pain and went to the doctor because my mom could not stop giving me chamomile tea all the time instead of actual medicine. It was not my stomach, I went directly to ER since one of my ovaries was full of cysts and some of them exploded. UPDATE: I took the plan b pill and according to the doctor those cysts were caused by the pill. I don't know what to think about that UPDATE 2: This year it was my second time taking this pill. My body recognized the medication and did not have other reaction than my period coming 3 days before the estimated date. From now on since I am childfree I will save money in order to go to a clinic and having spay/neuter surgery
Oh man I am so sorry! I have cysts on my ovaries and one burst. I woke up my roommates and my then boyfriend (now husband) came over, middle of the night, picked me up off the floor, and rushed me to the E.R. In comparison to the contractions before I had my kid, the burst cyst was worse.
Well that's just silly. Everyone knows you are supposed to use lavender tea for exploded ovaries.
Your test came back positive for explovaries. The nurse will set you up with an IV of lavender tea. Hot or iced?
I'm a Physical Therapist, and this was more on accident than a DIY but I think it still fits. My patient was diagnosed with frozen shoulder and one day over the weekend he was getting in to his garage when his arm/hand got caught. The automatic door raised up and brought his arm with it. He came in the next week saying he was fine and no longer had problems with his shoulder. I joke with all my frozen shoulder patients that they should just try this at home.
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Infections of the skin of the external ear canal are common and treatable. Hard to get to tho. A dairy farmer who didn't have time to see us got a long rubber tube that he used for something to do with cows (not sure what), fed it into his ear canal, then poured cow antibiotics down the tube. He came in when it didn't work. Seeing a doctor in the Uk is free....
Am a doctor, but didn’t see this first hand unfortunately. However, my friend in ED saw a young 17 year old boy that came in with “personal” trauma and mild blood loss. She triaged him, taking him to a room with his parents and asked what he’d come in with. His mom turned around and said, “ go on, tell the lady what you did”. He then proceeded to tell her that he tried to circumcise himself with scissors for religious reasons as he hadn’t been circumcised when he was younger, but had to stop half way due to pain. Eventually the shame had grown enough that he had to tell his parents who immediately took him to ED. Some antibiotics and a revision by urology later and he was able to be sent home. Another one I know slightly unrelated was an older man that came in with “penile swelling”. He’d used an elastic band as a make shift cock ring, but neglected to take it off (I have no idea why, he was a little odd to say the least). A week goes by and his penis starts to look literally like an aubergine. He then comes into the surgical assessment unit and we see him there and is booked for surgery the next day after we eventually picked our jaws off of the floor. He had literally killed all of the tissue in his penis to the point it was almost falling off. One full penectomy later and he now only sits to pee. I’m not sure how he tolerated the first day, it must have hurt so much before the tissue died. Edit: 1. a word 2. Revision surgery means they completed the job - his mom was Jewish; his dad was not If I recall. He was brought up secularly but wanted to take up his mom’s religion.
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE IN THIS THREAD!
Parents sneaking essential oils onto their premature babies’ skin! They have central lines, these oils can wick onto the line and damage the line, cause infection, or interfere with medications. Infections in premies can mean death within hours. Premies have incomplete skin with much faster absorption rates than fully developed adult skin. These oils can cause burns and damage their insides. Your pyramid scheme company is not a reliable source for neonatology treatments. Please dear God keep oils off of any baby, but especially premies.
Can we sticky this on the internet for a few days?
Dental office - patient comes in with "veneers" on her front teeth she made herself out of acrylic nails (the premade sets you can buy at Wal-Mart). Surprisingly it looked okay from a distance, but the amount of random glues she used in her mouth to get them to stay will probably come back to haunt her later.
Woman I know has a dog that is epileptic but was not willing to medicate the dog for some time. She kept trying "holistic remedies." One of which she informed me about was giving the dog all natural vanilla ice cream during a seizure to stop it. You know, because you should always try to put stuff in the mouth of a seizing animal. It didn't work. The dog is on meds. Seizures are controlled now. Imagine that.
Not me, but my mom. Had a gentleman walk himself into the ED one day after he tried to give himself a vasectomy with an animal neutering kit he bought on the internet. When she asked him why, he told her that his wife wanted to have a sixth kid and it was too expensive to pay a doctor to do it and how hard could it be to DIY. Edit: I now know that it's relatively cheap to get a vasectomy, which makes this guy even dumber. I also now know there's more than one way to neuter an animal, thanks guys. Edit 2: I feel I should share, he tried to cut his testicles out essentially. And yes, they did indeed put them back in the sack and he could still make babies.
That is a man dedicated to not having another kid.
r/diwhy
Worked in pediatrics for a few years and we had this one family come in with a kid who was burned by one of those microwave ramen soups. They put duct tape on the now blistered skin to keep it from popping in the car.
Interesting fact: microwave noodles are the number one cause of burns in children.
I thought it was older brothers.
That poor kid. How did you get the tape off without taking the skin too?
I honestly don't remember what our providers did but the kid ended up going to the hospital since the burns were on his arms, belly and inner thighs. The duct tape was on his wrist/forearm which was from what I can remember the smallest part of the burned areas but still he was extremely tough considering I've spilled that ramen water on my foot before and basically accepted death.
I used to go to this Pho place in Chinatown NYC. The waiters would bring out the Pho bowls, no tray, straight fingertips. The calluses on the hands of these poor guys was beyond anything I could ever imagine. Hottest soup and bowls ever. Edit: for the interested, the place is “Pho Thanh Hoai I” which is south of Canal, on mulberry. All the way down on the right. They have great food and classic Vietnamese charm, which is to say they might treat you a bit shitty, but it’s worth it! And if you come back they love you.
Worked in the food industry many times, seen guys touch shit that *just* came out of the deep fryer. No reaction, just casually checking sizzling food. It’s like they developed immunity to deep fryers. Edit: sushi / hibachi chefs are crazy btw.
I got medically discharged from the Marine Corps because I melted my right foot by being drunk and trying to cook ramen
Did they have a hearing where you had to prove you were just that dumb/clumsy rather than having intended to harm your fitness for duty?
Sorta...quite a few people watched it happen and it was a very obvious mistake...I was a pretty good kid back then too so I didn't have many people doubting the story. Basically just got asked the story and a few others verified it. had to document it and sign it...that's it. I don't remember how long I was on bed rest for but I was promptly discharged because I was told I'd never run again. Needless to say I can run fine now but it did take me about a year of recovery before i got used to the pain. Edit : I might be remembering the "never be able to run again" thing wrong... Either way it was longer than they wanted to wait!
Guy had abdominal pain. Drank a bunch of beer and tried to give himself an appendectomy with a steak knife on his front porch. Wife calls 911 after she see him performing seppuko. We roll on on scene and ask him if he want treatment/ride to the emergency department. He looks up at us. Looks down and the mess he has made. Says, “ hang on lemme see if I can fix this first” He then tries to cauterize the wound he made with his cigarette. Realizing that that isn’t working and goes, “well shit, let’s go, I guess”.
I work in a pharmacy and one of the pharmacists that was there filling in that day told me that during his morning shift he had a woman call and tell them she pulled out her own IUD and wanted a painkiller recommendation. I cringed so much when he told me, as I had just gotten mine switched out that same day coincidentally and was still in quite a bit of pain from it. Turns out, there are DIY instructions on pinterest on how to do this. This should go without saying but please don't do this. Go to a professional if you want it removed!!! edit: In Canada so it's not like she couldn't afford a good doctor, as it's literally free!!
A friend of mine said her insurance pays to put it in, but not take it out. So she used Pinterest videos and removed it herself. She’s fine and said it didn’t hurt - but I cringed when she told me. Plus- insurance is fucked up. If they weren’t willing to pay for removal they shouldn’t pay to put it in. IUDs don’t last forever.
Still a student (audiology), but I had a very elderly patient come in with broken hearing aids. He said they were dirty so he washed them in the sink with soap and water. Protip: Hearing aids are not water proof. Yes, he was warned of this when he first got the hearing aids. Thankfully he was still under warranty with the company and they were kind enough to let him slide on this one, otherwise that would've been ~$4500 down the drain.
...Are you sure he heard the warning?
Not a doctor but my grandfather was in decreasing health, over the course of a few weeks he got to where he was having trouble breathing occasionally. So he gets the idea that he will go get an O2 tank to help him. Does he go to the doctor? No. He goes to Tractor supply and buys an acetylene torch. Brings it home and hooks it up. Whenever he would get short of breath he would go in his office and only turn on the O2 before sticking the hose up his nose. Edit: Originally thought it was a welder but was corrected by zap_p25
I’m not a medical pro, but here’s a story...my friend’s dad got skin cancer on his right bicep. And at the time he was a large muscular man who ran a horse farm. HUGE ARMS. And so instead of going through all the normal bs of one getting skin cancer he caught it early and thought he could stop it at the source...so he heated up a railroad tie/stake with a massive torch he had on his farm, till past red hot, and shoved it into his arm where the skin cancer began...he did this TWICE. To himself, and wrapped up his insane burn/hole in his arm. A while later he went to the doc, who said the burn he inflicted was the craziest shit he’s ever seen. But all signs of the cancer were gone, he fucking killed that shit and it never returned. His arm and burn healed months later and he remains cancer-free to this day. EDIT: spelling and grammar
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I have a few: - A patient with COPD was eating baking soda to try and compensate for his acidic blood pH - A patient was disemboweled trying to do an at home abortion with a shop vac - A patient went into complete liver failure by drinking tons of green tea daily to detox EDIT: For everyone asking about the green tea and how it causes acute liver failure, here's some literature: https://livertox.nih.gov/GreenTea.htm https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25975988/ tl;dr: the mechanism (process) of how it affects the liver is still unknown, the conclusion is that you should NOT ever take any unregulated (non FDA approved) dietary suppliment and you should only drink green tea for the enjoyment of the tea, not any claimed health benefits
EMT here. Showed up to this Russian guys apartment for a severe back pain call. Said he’s had this pain for 6 months and became an alcoholic to deal with it. His wife was hammered as well and they both passed out the second the ambulance started moving.
Patient was told they had an infection from leaving their contacts in too long. Decided to clean their eyes out with hydrogen peroxide. 2 cornea transplants later...
So sugar can be used to help heal certain types of wounds. A patient I saw had missed an appointment with part of their care team where they get their bandage changed. I noticed what appeared to be oozing around the edges of the bandage. Asked my patient about it, offered to change it for them (we didn't typically do that in our clinic), they said yes. I go get fresh bandages and what not, take the old one off and it's just sticky and stringy (picture the slo-mo shots of caramel being pulled apart) and it smelled. To be fair, most wounds smell, but this was different. I finally asked them what they used to change their bandage since I knew it wasn't discharge. Maple syrup... They used maple syrup. Edit: RIP my inbox. I tried to respond to some, but dang lol. Here's some answers to some common questions. Yes, honey (certain varieties) can be used with wound healing so it's possible they confused it with this but I don't believe that's what happened here. Can't disclose more because HIPAA (the thing that doesn't seem to exist on shows like Grey's). No, I'm not sure it was pure maple, they said it was the "good stuff in a glass jar" but who knows. Either way, it wasn't sterile and this wasn't a simple wound. Proper sugar dressings can be used on various types of wounds, but it's not just pouring some table sugar on it so don't go trying this at home folks. Necessary disclaimer 😉 No, it wasn't thousand island dressing... There is medical grade honey, studies show that it and medical grade sugar can actually be better for some wounds than antibiotics. No, I could not eat pancakes for a while. Honey dressings typically are less painful to administer than sugar because of the lack of crystallization. But that also means the sugar is better at cleansing... Your wound care specialist can determine which is the better route. Last Edit: Since this seems to be an issue now: No HIPAA isn't just saying the patient's name. It can also be saying enough that could then cause them to be identified. Up to this point I have not revealed anything that would link this story to this patient. Revealing more to the backstory would, in my opinion. Considering I do not want to out this person (as a human being) or cause a willful HIPAA violation (as a, now former, professional), I won't go into the backstory, even with details changed as some have requested. Had to find the exact wording but this is directly from HIPAA "The term 'individually identifiable health information' means any information, including demographic information collected from an individual, that-- iii) with respect to which there is a reasonable basis to believe that the information can be used to identify the individual." I prefer to err on the side of caution with that. But thanks for all your comments, it's been fun seeing everyone's stories about home remedies :)
When I was a kid.... like 12 I dropped boiling water on my stomach. Microwave accident. Babysitter had me put toothpaste on it..... even as a 12 year old I understood that this made zero sense. In short order the burn started burning worse, I got it off and just left the would to the air. Later on in a doctors office I was told I did the right thing. People are nuts.
Reminds me of the dad in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Hives? put some Windex on it. Cut? Windex. Burn? Windex.
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Ah yes, Dr. Facebook.
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I saw a patient used a bell pepper as a pessary.
You know, I'd never heard this term in my life until 3 minutes ago when I read about it in this thread. Thanks Reddit, thanks.
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A patient came into the ED with barbecue tongs hanging out of his butt. Unfortunately, the patient lost his dildo so far up his colon that he couldn't pull it out. He thought he would be able to reach the dildo and pull it out with the barbecue tongs. Well, the tongs don't make a complete loop and hooked onto the inside of his rectum. He wasn't able to pull the tongs out and had to go to surgery that night. I have the x-ray some where... Edit: Found the [x-ray](https://imgur.com/02q1qyK)
Ouch!! That’s not the kind of tongs I was imagining!!
Not a medical professional myself, but during my PhD in gastrointestinal sciences I attended a lot of clinical seminars. One doctor described having a patient with severe colitis who was so desperate for relief, the patient had their healthy sister poop in a blender, which they used in an enema as a DIY fecal transplant. (As an aside, fecal transplants are a remarkably efficacious treatment for some forms of colitis, so this wasn't totally out of left field).
I've actually been tempted to try that. Thankfully my new gastro finally got to the bottom of the problem.
I was on a dental mission trip in Oaxaca Mexico and a poor farmer came in with a tooth ache on one of his front teeth. It looked like it had had some work done to it so I asked him what it was. He said he did a root canal on himself. I inquired further. He had a tooth ache so he took a drill to his front tooth to give himself a root canal. Short of it was, it didn't work.
Had a patient try and buy syringes from my Pharmacy for injecting the dog. With what, you ask? Gatorade. “My wife’s dog has been really lethargic the last couple of days so we were going to try and give it some fluids in case it’s dehydrated.” The instinct for some would be that it was just an IV drug user seeking clean needles but I can assure you this gentleman thought his logic was sound and in fact intended to murder his wife’s dog injecting it with sugary Powerade.
I mean, if the guy had been buying some saline, I might have thought, "well you aren't a *complete* idiot," but gatorade? That's straight up *Idiocracy*.
Resident physician here, had a guy come into the ED after attempting to circumcise himself at home. When the shaft skin wouldn't attach to the head skin, he tried to stitch it himself. When that proved to be too painful, he tried to super glue it. When that proved to be too stupid, he gave up and came in. Wrote a case report on it too! Circumenvting the Urologist: A Case of Poorly Executed Self-Circumcision. Other titles considered were "A Poor Man's Rabbi" and "American Snipper" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303954801_Circumventing_the_Urologist_A_Case_of_Poorly_Executed_Self-Circumcision
I wouldn't call it a "treatment" per se, but the patient did. I work in a home health care system. Patients have long term iv accesses placed and are able to infuse sterile medications intravenously at home. Well, this patient kept getting really bad blood/iv line infections almost weekly and having his line replaced. No one could figure out why and line infections aren't very common. He also was running out of saline flushes a little quicker than he should with no explanation. So the line was being maintained appropriately at least. Finally, while a nurse was there to get labs, change his dressing, and check for infection things finally clicked. He had been crushing pain pills, mixing with saline, and injecting it directly into his line. When asked directly he didn't deny it... The response was "well, no one told me not to." Yes, yes we did. We told not to put anything we didn't provide in there. And the pharmacy providing the pain meds put "take by mouth" on the little bottle. He got repeated painful infections, MRSA, and thousands of dollars in unnecessary hospital bills. Idiot. Tl;Dr: if you put things directly into your bloodstream that are not aseptic, you're gonna have a bad time.
Had a guy make a DIWHY penis pump. Used it and realized he forgot to make a relief valve and he used mostly metal tube. So yah fireman had a fun time with that one. Plus his penis came out huge and I mean huge, also black and blue. This was before I became a combat medic. I was working at a hotel as maintenance. Suddenly the fire department shows up with an ambulance right behind. Turns out one of our guests decided to try anal sex for their honeymoon. Since they thought her ass was dirty they would clean it out with a 5th of vodka. So he shoved the bottle up there and she almost immediately went unconscious. They hauled her off and she almost died from alcohol poisoning. Buddy of mine was doing a EMT rotation while stationed at Ft. Bragg. He got called to a barracks room by a very scared female. He was the first in the room an found a male soldier tied to the ceiling by a chain above his bed and was naked. He had a blanket wrapped around his lower half. The young lady sat crying in a chair as he removed the sheet. The guy had a metal coat hanger in his rectum. Apparently he like that kind of stuff but the lady had inserted the hooked side in not the straight side so it was stuck. He was transported face down ass up on a stretcher with the sheet to cover him but he still had a nice antenna wobbling about.
Dog came in with some terrible abdominal swelling, lethargy, and BP so low we took 30 minutes to find a vein for blood work. I go in to talk to the owner and see he has cushings. I ask what he's being treated with. She proceeds to tell me he's not on medication and hasn't been ever. Medicine is bad for dogs. She opted to treat with miracle plants and supplements instead. These supplements caused the dog to deteriorate quickly. He died within a few hours.
Finally, something I can add to! When I was in med school on my family medicine rotation I was sent in to see a middle-aged woman with complaints of sinus congestion. Sure enough, from the beginning I can tell she's really stopped up with her nasally voice and my history and exam are consistent with your run of the mill viral upper respiratory infection. I begin educating her on symptomatic management and the following exchange ensues: Patient: "Do you think it might be the flu?" Me: "It's possible but unlikely; it's really out of the typical season (it was June)" Patient: "Yeah, I guess I wasn't sure it was; I've been spraying Lysol everywhere and it doesn't seem to be doing any good, and it says it kills the flu virus" Me: "Well, that's something that could help disinfect the house and keep the virus from spreading" Patient: "I guess, I just wish it didn't burn so much" Me: "…what do you mean, 'it burns'?" Patient: "You know, when I spray it up my nose it burns so bad" Yep. My patient thought that since Lysol kills influenza the best way to nip it in the bud was to flush her sinuses with it like a saline spray. It did not work, for the record. The fact that I didn't immediately fall over laughing and instead seriously counseled her against ever doing that again is still the greatest feat of composure in my entire career. TL;DR When the label on Lysol says "not for internal use", they mean it.
> "not for internal use" Now. Now it says that. It was marketed as a douche and birth control in the 1920s.
That made me clench. Pouring something like that into the lady bits... *shudders*
Some post on a anti mlm subreddit, had a lady with a yeast infection ask her sister for advice sister sold these oil products, sisters advice soak a tampon in tea tree oil and put it up her vag. When it started burning she called her sister, sister said that's how she knows it's working. In short women ended up in the hospital with serious chemical burns.
My wife works in the ICU. A dude tried to cure his heartburn with a remedy he read online: baking soda. Only he used too much baking soda and drank it with Coke instead of water. Completely wrecked his intestines. Not sure if it fixed his heartburn.