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37 Doctors Share Which Diseases Should Scare People More Than They Do
Advances in medicine and technology have made humankind less worried about serious ailments. Many have become complacent, knowing that these illnesses have corresponding treatment options.
What people may fail to realize is that these diseases still carry hefty, even potentially life-threatening consequences if not given proper attention. Here are some examples shared by people on Reddit, including some medical professionals who have seen it all.
This list isn’t meant to scare any of you. Rather, it is to remind everyone to take their health seriously. You wouldn’t want to start taking action when it’s already too late.
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#2
First, I must go on a rant about people INSISTING that they use antibiotics for things that don't really need them; and when they do, not using it properly. You don't get an antibiotic only to stop it three days earlier than instructed to. You are literally helping bacteria to become resistant against that antibiotic.
To answer your question:
MRSA is pretty scary.
#3
Nurse here. Clostridium difficile.
This is a bacteria that's infects your gut. It causes explosive diarrhea and ends 14000 Americans each year.
The bacteria can't be destroyed with normal sanitation solutions because it will turn into a spore which makes it last months at a time on surfaces. Hand-sanitizer doesn't get rid of it - you have to wash your hands. Our normal cleaning wipes don't get rid of it - you have to use bleach.
I take care of C-diff patients all the time - at least one a week. It's super common in hospitals and it is resistant to most antibiotics.
Lil be lil 20 minutes ago
Can I get C-diff from my antibiotic? There is a warning with my prescription. Should I take it? And I don't understand what this is saying, do you get from surfaces and on your hands, how does it get in your stomach or if you get it through the antibiotic pill and into stomach then need another antibiotic to get rid of it? I am really afraid.
#4
ER/ICU nurse here. What scares me most is any disease we have vaccines against but people refuse to get. Measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, varicella, HPV. All communicable diseases that are making a comeback thanks to antivax idiots.
Diabetes, heart problems, etc I can prevent through my own actions. Communicable diseases I can't.
#5
Depression. It will literally mess up every aspect of your life. And so many people have it without realising and wonder why their life is so bad and they take no pleasure from anything. So then they end themselves. Seriously lethal illness if not treated. Thankfully it's highly treatable with medication and if needed some therapy.
Lil be lil 12 minutes ago
Depression is a response to your environment which you can't change and medication fails to help because it does not address the cause which is not a chemical imbalance contrary to what you have been taught to think. Mostly women have it because they are married to asshtole men. Stop taking pills and divorce the jerk!
#6
You should worry about any of the already present, very common, bacterial infections that are becoming resistant. The word the CDC is using to describe the consequences of gradually failing antibiotics is "catastrophic." Cuts and scrapes and sniffles we routinely minimize will, soon, once again be destroying us.
#7
Lou Gehrig's Disease. It essentially shuts down your muscles and important organ systems over the course of 5 or so years. At the end, you have a functioning mind but you're trapped in a useless body. Many athletes and military veterans get diagnosed with it later in life, and we don't really know what causes it or how to prevent it. What's even more concerning is the fact that many more young people are being diagnosed and having their lives cut short.
#8
Not a disease, but tongue rings! Wore down the inner bone of my jaw with little damage to gums, so didn't know till the puss was seeping out and I needed a bone graft. Cannot stress the amount of damage they do.
#9
I feel like people don't take diabetes as seriously as they should. It's something that could cause you to lose one or multiple limbs, your eyesight or even your life.
Also, tooth decay. I've seen quite a lot of people in their 30s who neglected their teeth during their teenage years/young adulthood and required extensive dental work which isn't only super expensive, but also very stressful for the patient. Brushing your teeth twice a day is a very easy way of preventing that.
David Paterson 4 hours ago
Most people who brush their teeth frequently still require extensive dental work.
#10
Heart disease! I work in a Cardiac ward of a Hospital. 40% of our patients are just really really really old. (85+). 50% are people between the ages of 40 and 60 who are obese or very overweight. Old people have heart problems because, they are old. 40-60 year olds only have heart problems because they are obese and lead unhealthy lifestyles. I would say almost all of these patients could have avoided their heart problems by watching their weight and walking for 30minutes a day.
For those who were wondering, the other 10% are legitimate, unavoidable stuff like 10 year olds with holes in their hearts or younger people having a pacemaker replaced.
#11
Prions. No cure...just have to waste away. How awful!
#12
Not a nurse or a doctor, but still sort of, kind of, relevant. Take your body seriously. In college my roommate got flesh eating disease. we believe she got it from tanning in a tanning bed that was not properly disinfected, but there's no way to be sure. It's clinical name was necrotizing fasciitis. One day she felt like she had pulled a muscle, later in that day her leg got red and eventually got a bit swollen. She complained of pain for 2 days and we all just contributed that to her being a drama queen and wanting attention.
Her mom, being a nurse, advised her to go to the hospital. They rushed her in for surgery to remove the rotten skin to avoid the infection spreading, though it did continue to spread. The doctor told her that if she waited another day, she would have lost her leg, and any longer than that and she could have passed. Over the 17 days she spent in the hospital, she had 7 surgeries and 2 skin grafts. her leg was really messed up.
Lil be lil 1 minute ago
Yikes! That's bad and it's like you never know...you could sit in the wrong chair, or something.
#13
Legionnaires disease.
Scary stuff - basically your air conditioner will end you.
David Paterson 4 hours ago
Just for clarification, those giant rooftop air conditioners, not household split system ones. Here, all rooftop air conditioners have a mandatory regular inspection to catch any Legionella bacteria before it becomes a problem. I don't know about your country.
#14
Measles. Most people assume it is like the chickenpox and not dangerous to kids but measles kills. Plus we should have eradicated measles like polio ages ago but people won't vaccinate their kids. There was an outbreak new me in the past few months and I think there was 1 or 2 deaths. Vaccinate your kids people.
#15
Doctor Here. Here's the truth and I won't go with the high profile answers. But I will tell you on the whole, that for everyone reading this right now, the vast vast majority will not get the hell scared out of them from High Blood Pressure, High Cholesterol and Diabetes.... but you should, and I'm really sorry to say this but... you will.
Exercise, Stop Smoking and Eat a Balanced Diet.
David Paterson 4 hours ago
Thankfully there are now effective treatments for all three. Just 40 years ago there weren't.
#16
Alzheimer's. People sometimes laugh it off but it scares me worse than cancer.
#17
Lyme disease. My state doesn't recognize it but it is a real issue.
#18
Ebola. It's been in the news the past few days, but aside from that not much is said. Read The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. Scariest book I've ever read.
#19
ICU RN weighing in here. Disease to fear: Infective Endocarditis.
You get a bloodstream infection as a result of anything from a puncture (dirty needle, rusty nail, etc) to a rotten tooth and these bacteria start forming these little vegetative leaflets on the back sides of your heart valves. They grow bigger and bigger and bigger until one day one breaks off and your cardiovascular system takes it away to become lodged somewhere. If its small enough and you're reaaaaaaly lucky, it will get stuck in your lungs and you'll just have a pulmonary embolism (from which you might die) or get stuck in your kidney (acute renal failure, have fun on dialysis). But you probably aren't that lucky so it will lodge itself in the brain (massive stroke calling, your times up!) or go straight to your heart (massive heart attack) and you're dead before you can clutch your chest.
Here's the really awful messed up part. If I see you go down and hit the floor from this, I'm going to immediately start CPR (unless I see some marker saying you're a DNR-CC). I'm going to start compressing your chest like its my job, squeezing your heart and pumping blood. But when I do this (unbeknownst to me) more of these leaflets are going to start breaking off and showering your organs with these little embolli that will get stuck in those tissues causing further damage. If you're lucky, you'll stay dead. If you're not, you'll have a short meaningless, tortured existence.
#20
Diabetes. Had a pt in his early 30s who was noncompliant with his meds (HgBa1c 10%) that got a small foot ulcer. Patient did not pay much attention to it, and kind of brushed it off - only used topical antibiotics. Ultimately became osteomyelitis (bone infection) - wound consult could pass a probe right through the dorsal and plantar surfaces. Surgeons amputated everything below the knee.
#21
Why has Tuberculosis not been mentioned yet? It's a multiply medicine resistant, highly infectious, high mortality disease that is pandemic. It also tears through people with AIDS like crazy. I dread the day the sorts of TB arriving in the US from South America arrive in Europe.
David Paterson 4 hours ago
1.23 milion people died from TB worldwide in the year 2024. 150,000 of those had HIV.
#22
Multiple Sclerosis or any of the many central nervous system issues that we can have. Honestly, most cancers are applicable here as well because we are so surrounded by carcinogens that we are bound to have higher rates in many cancers. These are especially noticeable in firefighters, where they are exposed to burning petroleum products that contain god knows what. Granted most firefighters are required to wear SCBAs but hey, stuff happens.
#23
Here's something that is not a disease, but that I think you should REALLY care about: diminishing long-term treatment compliance.
What is that, you ask? Well, say you're on a treatment for a certain disease for life. At first, you take your pills just like your doctor prescribed. Then, months in, you slip a few doses, or maybe some days you don't take them at the precise schedule they should be taken. Then you skip days altogether. And why do you? Because you stop feeling sick, or you stop noticing the difference the medication does.
This can be catastrophic in many situations, but there are two that I personally consider more important: in mental health conditions, and in immunosuppressive therapy after an organ transplant.
In both these cases you stop noticing what the medication is actually doing, and as you stop being disciplined about it, you increase the risk of serious complications and acutisations.
Non-compliance in immunosuppressive therapy in particular, is very bad. These days, even delivering different numbers, every published study agrees most rejections are caused by non-compliance to treatment. You're about 3 times more likely to develop a late acute rejection if you're non-compliant. Basically, your lack of discipline can cost you your very rare 2nd chance - your kidney, your liver, your heart, you lungs.
Same goes for diabetics - you don't notice your glucose levels are through the roof as easily as you notice they're too low. You skip a few insuline doses and notice no immediate consequence - that doesn't mean they don't exist!
So, just remind yourself that the medication you buy and take everyday is there for a reason. You feel great, probably because it's doing its job.
David Paterson 4 hours ago
Stopping taking prescription medicines too early for mental illness is another huge one.
#24
Stop freaking out and taking antibiotics for colds. Each and every one of us is the culmination of over a BILLION years of evolution, you can handle a cold!
#25
Hep C. Probably worse than HIV. No great treatment. High conversion rate to liver cancer.
David Paterson 3 hours ago
"Globally, an estimated 50 million people have chronic hepatitis C virus infection, with about 1.0 million new infections occurring per year. WHO estimated that in 2022, approximately 242 000 people died from hepatitis C. ... There is no effective vaccine."
#26
Gonorrhoea, and the fact that it is becoming incredibly resistant to our current treatment options. And to make matters worse, we don't really have solid treatment options for when new strands are completely resistant to Ceftriaxone.
#27
Saw a post of a leg infected with something and the comments said it was black plague and that there's an outbreak in China so there's that.
David Paterson 3 hours ago
Black plague, Yersinia pestis, is still around in Madagascar, sub-saharan Africa, and Arizona. So far it's treatable with antibiotics. So far.
#28
Malaria. Though it's not common to catch in the states, and is most commonly associated with mosquitos, it has ended half of every person who had ever lived on Earth. And treatment is unreasonably difficult to get in the places where it's still a threat.
David Paterson 3 hours ago
It took 50 years to get the malaria vaccine, developed in the 1970s, approved for release. It's still only approved for children.
#29
Honestly the biggest health risk I'm seeing more and more in young populations is obesity. Obese patients that come in with relatively benign problems fair much more poorer than people who have an appropriate weight. I'm in the intensive care unit this week and there are 2 patients here who are obese that came in with relatively treatable illnesses except there bodies behave as if they are in their 90s. Additionally there are an increasingly more and more peer reviewed articles stating that obese people do much worse in major surgeries/difficult hospital stays than any other population. Lastly the generation right now that are obese and sick are usually in their 60s, and didn't turn this way until their late 40s. However nowadays you are seeing more and more children become obese at a younger age, which can lead to more devestating illnesses at a younger age. All the patients I speak to about their weight tell me how they started off slightly overweight, but the combination of both age and ingrained habits led to unmitigated weight gain that was near impossible to lose. So moral of the story is stay within a normal weight range, and if you end up going down the dark side please do everything you can to return to a normal body weight.
#30
Chinkungunya is starting to look like its gonna be pretty scary within the next decade.
#31
Diabetes. Diabetes is the freaking worst, because the second you get it, you develop 10000 other problems.
#32
It might not be a disease as we traditionally view them but antibacterial resistance. Seriously, we bathe ourselves in antibiotic soap daily.
#33
Most of the really dangerous stuff has been covered by others here. However, while not usually life threatening - these lesser threats still scare the hell out of me.
Chikungunya - spreading in the Caribbean to near epidemic levels, and can cause years of joint pain if you get it (mosquito carrier)
Lone star tick bites - found in most of the US east of the Mississippi (and spreading) and induces long-term allergy to red meat.
#34
Lyme Disease
I'm not a doctor, but my mother is a nurse. My whole family was diagnosed with Lyme Disease a few years ago, and it's quite traumatic. It can cause horrendous muscle pains, joint swelling, and memory loss. One day after leaving Highschool, I forgot how to get home. Three years of going to this school, taking the same route everytime, and my brain had just let it all slip away. I ended up asking a friend who lives near by if he could lead me home.
#35
Obesity. It's the number one preventable cause of death, it accelerates the speed of aging, it increases your risk of cancer, it contributes to the epidemic of type II diabetes, it makes surgery more risky, and it can be incapacitating in itself.
#36
Not a doctor or a nurse, but I did have to do a lot of extensive reading about people going to the ER instead of a dentist for a toothache and having an infection spread from their tooth/teeth into their brain
I would honestly like to know how true this was, because I have two teeth that are pretty bad. I know I should see a dentist, but I haven't seen one in like 16 years, so I'm partially embarrassed/scared.
My mom used to be a dentist in Mexico, *years ago* and tells me to go, but assures me that I'm not going to die because of it.
I'm torn between facing a fear and my health, so I'd love to hear from professionals.
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