“Can’t You Just Live With It?”: 72 Times Doctors Said The Most Unhinged Things

Kept crying for 6 weeks after back surgery that the pain in my head was unbearable. I was told “you have no pain.You want to pay for my kids college education ?!! Sure I ‘ll do exploratory surgery” …..2 days later he did exploratory surgery to repair a tear in my spinal cord which was caused a cerebral spinal fluid leak!

Drs should never be allowed to tell someone they are not in pain.

"if you pray to Jesus and let him into your life he will help you with your diabetes"

I reported them to my local health authority and Two months later they were forceably retired by the medical clinic they practiced out of.

Asked my gp for the first time about the debilitating pain I got during periods where I could barely walk or function. He told me that I should get pregnant soon and that would fix it. I was 16, my mum was outraged. 14 years later I was diagnosed with endometriosis.

At 30, with my MRI (that I didn't actually get to read myself for 10+years) in her hand showing all the inflammation, the remodeling, the calcified ligaments, the stenosis in my spine, the narrowing, the bulging, the **FUSION** of my joints...

"You're too young for arthritis"

She could have slowed it down and added literal YEARS to my active lifestyle, but instead she gaslit me, told me the pain is in my head, that I needed to lose weight (I was a healthy 160 at 5'8), that there was nothing medically wrong with me.

Now at 46, I'm diagnosed with a form of spinal arthritis that's already fused several joints in my spine, hands, and other extremities. I'm in *constant* pain, and I rarely leave home anymore because moving hurts and it's exhausting being in pain all the time.

During my first delivery, my epidural line broke while I was pushing. I pushed for 3 and 1/2 hours - baby was born and whisked away to the NICU because she was having trouble breathing. Then my placenta got stuck.

My OB was having trouble trying to get it to deliver because she said, it looked like it the cord was trying to tear away from the placenta. She called the OB on-call at the hospital.

I will give him a little bit of benefit of the doubt because, you know, no one knew that my epidural line had broken (it never completely took for me so I still had *some pain* during labor) but he stuck his hand Inside of me to try and scoop it out. I SCREAMED. But then he didn't believe me when I said it hurt too much and tried it AGAIN! I have never screamed so loud in my life.

Thank God for my husband who stood up and yelled at him to get off of me and that I was obviously in pain. Got wheeled back to the OR and put under for them to remove it. Lo and behold, they realized about my epidural.

The fact that he didn't believe me is just.....baffling.

Mine missed a big diagnosis that is fatal if not treated. He was angry other doctors found out. He told me he wished I’d passed away and not to come back. Cool. I hate this timeline.

I told him I was struggling to run because of hayfever, in the hope he’d test me for allergy-induced asthma or give me stronger meds. He told me I should just stop running. 

Another told me I had period cramps when in fact my appendix had burst. .

When I had a cervical biopsy, my doctor told me that there are no nerve endings in the cervix, so I could not feel any pain.

Tried to get my tubes tied at 25 AFTER already having three children.

This man/doctor really looked me in my eyes and told me “no” because “I know you’ve managed to convince yourself but you haven’t convinced me”.

Does getting laughed at count? Asked for sterilization in my late 30s with no kids. He then proceeded to insist my boyfriend at the time be consulted

Go figure many of these responses are from women regarding women's issues.

From wife: she got an iud and hated it. It was painful to have it inserted and it made her feel like she was going crazy. She couldn’t hold a thought and it changed her hair texture - just weird stuff. This was after about 3 months.

She went to the dr to have it removed and he told her no, because insurance had paid for it and it wasn’t a good use of their funds to take it out. She tried again a week later and he said no because “it was all in her head.”

She changed gynos to one that “by women for women” and that gyno took it out with local anesthetic on her cervix without questioning why.

My doctor was doing a Pap smear and told me I was tight and that my boyfriend must really like that.

Edit: it was a woman.

“If you keep trying to diagnose every little thing in your body, your health insurance will catch on. And they’ll stop paying for your tests.”

I had TOS. I was asking for a referral to deal with the unending pain of neurogenic TOS. He has just done the poor man test in his office that clearly showed my pulse stopped in certain positions. I politely insisted on my referral. I had surgery within six months. And within a year I was fully active again.

Dr Champigny, you ARE a pig.

My old man gynecologist told me when I was very young that I had "feminine violin disorder". In other words, that I was curved a little less on top than on bottom. He also scrubbed me out with a bristly bottle-scrubber once when I had a discharge--oy, that was painful. And unnecessary. Come to think of it, all the gynecologist I've ever had (I'm 70 now), except for the one I have now, have been awful people.

I was told "it's not your choice to make" in regards to my vasectomy and that if I did it before having children I'm a failure as a human.

Look doc I failed as a human long before I decided I don't want kids.

At 16, I had excruciating stomach pains. I was having a period at the times but it was not that sort of pain, even at 16 I knew the difference.


The GP dismissed it as period pain, and when I said it was much more severe, he suggested a miscarriage .He sent me away anyway without even examining me.


I lived in a children's home at the time and that night, I screamed the house down apparently (I have no memory of it, I guess I'd passed out?)


An ambulance arrived very quickly and at the hospital, I was rushed to the operating theatre. My appendix had ruptured and I had peritonitis too. I ended up in hospital for 3 weeks.


Fun times!

That I’d somehow caused the scarring on my kidneys by worrying too much about it.

At 12 I had gained some weight and my mom took me to the doctor to be checked. He looked at a 12 year old girl and said, "I bet your family came from Germany. You're built for starvation conditions. You just need to go with that."
Queue a lifetime of disordered eating. Bonus points when I found out his own daughter was hospitalized with anorexia at 11.

So you have PTSD? Then its clear you just have anxiety. Go to a psychiatrist, not here to the emergency room, this is for sick and terminal patients.

Then I coded. I was in fact having a serious cardiac event that required emergency treatment. Not anxiety.

Told the VA disability doc I had anxiety and she said I should just drink less coffee. I drink one to two cups a day. Also, I was only 6 weeks back from deployment but obviously that has nothing to do with anxiety. /s.