Netizen Asks: “Doctors, What Are The Dead Giveaway Signs That Someone Is Faking?” – Gets 30 Tales

There are many threads on the Internet where the topic starters ask doctors about the strangest cases of their patients faking diseases, or being overdramatic (or sometimes underdramatic) - and each time, the discussion gets more than one or two thousand comments.

Are many doctors and nurses natural-born storytellers? Or perhaps hospitals just seem like places where something weird happens from time to time... Who knows?

Be that as it may, we have specially collected for you three dozen stories about different people who were being very difficult while visiting doctors, and how it all ended for them all. So please feel free to enjoy these stories - from sad to eye-opening and sometimes outright hilarious!

In this collection, you will find tales and plots for every taste - from completely conscious manipulations of someone's health for some selfish purposes (for example, to receive insurance compensation), to completely ridiculous situations where a person is sincerely convinced that they have some kind of disease (or they have been told this for many years).

Well, and of course, a separate category of stories is related to kids and teens - because a child's sense of their body and their own psyche is often radically different from that of adults. In other words, children may simply not realize what's wrong with them - and take everything rather literally. Which sometimes makes related stories absolutely odd.

It's interesting that in world history and culture, there are many cases when people, consciously or unconsciously, claimed to have some kind of illness, and it took serious efforts to dissuade them of this.

For example, the legendary play by the French playwright Moliere called "The Imaginary Invalid," or the novel "Catch 22" by the American writer Joseph Heller, the hero of which, the army officer, resorts to many means to avoid returning to war.

Well, sometimes people are just simply convinced that they are sick, often with other folks' personal insidious goals. It's quite enough to recall the scene from the "The Lord of the Rings" movie where the lying courtier Grima literally bewitched the King Théoden of Rohan, and it took the intervention of the wizard Gandalf to "cure" the king. But doctors, alas, are not magicians...

"Sometimes many such cases are associated with the so-called Munchausen syndrome," says Iryna Stasiuk, an expert in syndromic therapy from Odessa, Ukraine, whom Bored Panda asked for a comment here. "This syndrome, named after a literary character known for his tendency to tell lies nearly everywhere, describes situations when a person deliberately simulates or induces illness syndromes in themselves in order to receive treatment."

"The reason for such behavior lies rather in the mental plane - a person simply wants additional attention, care and sympathy from others, and if these are doctors and nurses, they are quite happy with this. By the way, often, if such a person is denied treatment or is declared cured, they may well turn to other specialists - with the same goal."

"There is also a variation of this syndrome - the so-called delegated syndrome, when people try to convince everyone that their children, parents or spouses have a disease. Admitting these 'patients' for sure. In this case, it's caused by a mental need to provide increased care for the 'patients' - even if they don't need this care at all," Irina says.

So, when you read these stories, please try to perceive everything critically enough - in fact, what may look funny or absurd may well be a situation that actually requires medical intervention. Not, let's say, a surgeon or a dentist, but a psychoanalyst.

In any case, we're pretty much sure you'll find these tales quite interesting, so have a nice time reading, and maybe add your own stories of such kind in the comments below - if you have ever had to face or witness something similar too. The more interesting and informative the reading, the better!