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No one really likes going to a hospital, but, generally you know that the person looking after you has spent many long years in training. But someone asked “Doctors, what is the most unethical thing you have done or you have heard of a fellow doctor doing involving a patient?” and people shared what they’d seen.
Despite what you might read here, remember, the vast majority of medical professionals are just that, professional and well trained. Still, hopefully you’re not reading this while waiting at a hospital, get as comfortable as you can, upvote your favorites and be sure to add your own stories to the comments down below.
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#1
Not unethical exactly, but frowned upon by the hospital if they found out. When I was a junior doctor, I had an elderly patient on our specialist cardiology ward who'd had to travel 100 miles for a really specialist treatment. She didn't have any family, and all her friends were similarly elderly and couldn't drive far, let alone a 200 mile round trip to visit her. She confided in me that she was running out of clean nightdresses and was embarrassed as she didn't know what to do, so I took them home and washed them for her in my machine. Looking back, I'm sure there was some procedure I should have followed - we're not supposed to get personally involved - but she was so sweet and it was late and all the admin people had gone home.
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#2
It's gotta be this guy: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Courtney He diluted cancer chemotherapy drugs for years to make profit. Countless d***s, countless needless treatments, countless cancer study data rendered useless. By one man.
#3
My best friend's mother, Roulla, is from Lebanon. When Roulla was a young girl she got pretty badly injured and went to the hospital. The doctor then proceeded to tell Roulla's mother that she had passed away due to the injuries. She did not believe her and soon discovered Roulla locked in a closet, waiting to be presumably be sold.
#4
Not a doctor, but a (male) nurse at a hospital I worked at was caught sodomizing (male) patients as they were recovering from surgery.
#5
My step dad is a dentist had a boss, who was a fellow dentist, that was doing fillings on teeth that did not have cavities to generate more money. My step dad blew the whistle and started his own practice.
sturmwesen 8 hours ago
My chilhood dentist found a reason to make money every d**n time. changed the dentist and suddenly my teeth were fine
#6
I am currently a medicine student in Mexico. One of my professors told us that during his residency he worked in hospital on a fairly poor area. In these sorts of places birth control is a relatively unused practice, leading to poor families of 6+ children. In effort to stop this, they began to sterilise women during their children's birth regardless of their wishes. Its still a fairly common practice in the hospital.
#7
On a daily basis in most every hospital in North America, 90-something year old demented people with every disease under the sun - abandoned by their family (or worse, overly attached) - are brought to the operating room for 'emergency surgery' and are cut open by surgeons telling themselves they're doing the right thing by prolonging these people's miserable existences.
I think one of the biggest social changes in my lifetime will have to be how we care for the elderly at end of life.. Our resources simply can't handle the default 'do everything' attitude in North America.
Source: I'm an anesthesia resident.
Mrs Irish Mom 3 hours ago
It's very risky to do any sort of surgery on a 90+ year old patient so they should be given pain relief and made comfortable
#8
A doctor prescribed chemo for patients who didn't actually have cancer
#9
I once knew an OB who didn't like to work after about 5pm, so at the end of office hours, if they had someone in labor they would swing by labor and delivery and find a reason to do a c-section on them. Sometimes they blamed the baby's heart rate tracing (justified or not), but the classic one would be that they would check the patient's cervix and lie about how dilated it was so it seemed as if labor wasn't progressing rapidly enough, and say "I just don't think this is going to work", cut her, and be home for dinner. Now in OB we love TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and one of the real indications for cesarean is CPD (cephalo-pelvic disproportion), which is where the baby's head is too big for the pelvis. But for this particular doc we always said that they cut patients for CPD (Cesarean Prior to Dinner).
#10
My roommate in dental school was a medical student. There was some big scandal at the hospital he was doing a rotation at because an anesthesiologist left the OR with the nurse anesthetist and left the patient alone. Something went wrong and the patient passed away on the table. Where were the two of them? Getting down in a nearby unused room thinking that nothing could happen in just a few minutes...
#11
My mums co-worker stitched his initials into a patient because he was so proud of his work.
#12
My mother says that while she was an intern at a hospital, a doctor didn't deliver a baby properly, and ended up breaking the baby's neck. He, and his supervisor tried to get my mother to take the blame, since she would only be reprimanded while he would lose his license. She refused.
#13
I'm not a doctor (yet), but when I was shadowing a doctor I went with her to an "malpractice risk management" meeting. The entire meeting was about how to cover up malpractice by shifting the blame on each other so no one can get sued, how to avoid testifying against each other in court, and how to use messy handwriting when filling out documents so if it does go to court, the evidence is hard to interpret. It even used dozens of examples of cases from the hospital that were actual malpractice, but the patient never got compensated because of the risk management techniques used to avoid being sued. That meeting absolutely horrified me. The funny thing is most people think its easy to sue a doctor for even genuine malpractice. It isn't.
Daisydaisy 6 hours ago
Wow, this is appalling. I keep trying to be cynical and tough, but the world shocks me on a daily basis
#14
There was an old dentist in my home town who was well liked. He was the sort of old timey dentist that wouldn't give you Novocain or anything like that. For anything more complicated than a filling, he would pull the tooth. He preserved the teeth in his basement in a barrel of chemicals to keep it from smelling.
He later put said teeth into a concrete memorial for his dog, thousands and thousands of teeth. After he died everyone learned he wasn't even a licensed dentist.
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/dentists_creepy_pet_project.
TheOGpandaHavana 7 hours ago
Of all the insane things this post says, the one that stands out the most is not the dog's tooth/cement memorial, but rather the fact that he was a well liked dentist who didn't numb his patients up before pulling said teeth.
#15
So a few years ago I went to the walk in doctor because I thought I had chlamydia. Doctor took a quick look and came to the same diagnosis and wrote me a prescription for some sort of antibiotic. Then he's like "actually I might have some left over from another patient" and proceeds to go into his drawer pull out a bottle full of the right pills and hands them to me. "Take one a day for the next week." I walk out and look at the Orange bottle and see that it still has the previous patients label on it including their full name. That walk in clinic was closed down about a year later, I can't imagine why...
#16
I briefly worked at the front desk clerk for an ER at a local hospital. The rule was the anyone that came in complaining of chest pains had to be back and on a machine within 10 minutes of arrival. Once I entered their name into the system a clock started. So I was told not to enter their name until they had already been taken back to essentially make our numbers look better and make it appear as though they were receiving care within the prescribed 10 minutes.
Edit: People complaining of chest pains were typically brought back quickly, just not always within the 10 minute guideline, although generally faster than anyone else. This mostly seemed to be just about producing better stats. Although keeping it off the system gave them the ability to delay.
MY OPINION: never trust an individual stat, they're almost always manipulated and if you have chest pains take aspirin.
#17
As a specialist who sees a lot of referrals, I see incompetence and laziness (which can be just as devastating) much more than outright unethical behavior.
Lee Gilliland 15 hours ago
And straight-out tired. So many mistakes made by an intern seriously short of sleep when there was no need.
#18
Things I've seen in the medical field:
* A patient removed from hospice for a hip replacement. She coded hours after leaving the OR, again, and again, and again. The sad part is that on hospice they agreed to forgo resusitation efforts. Since there was no paperwork confirming their wishes they "went out" in the exact way they had hoped to prevent.
* Different hospital, another surgeon decides to replace one of the major joints on a patient who had no realistic chance of walking either before, or after the surgery. For weeks I would have to go visit them nearly daily for blood draws, as I was the only person around who was able to collect a specimen from them without gross hemolysis. One day after a long weekend of other staff members attempting blood draws unsuccessfully I went in one more time. They thanked me through tears for not tormenting them like the others. Not long after the patient had to be transferred to a more intensive facility as a result of an infection acquired in our hospital. I do not believe they made it home ever again.
* A doctor asking a patient being admitted into the ER how they attempted to k**l them self. The patient pointed to a series of deep horizontal gashes in the arm. The doctor responded in an uproarious laughter, telling the patient that they must not be serious(down the road not across the street) and that they were only here for attention.
I've got more too, and I only worked in the medical field for 3 years.
#19
Emergency physician here. More than once I've called a surgeon for a patient needing to go to the OR, because they were incredibly ill with some intra-abdominal process or other, and they say "they're really sick, and they're gonna die anyway, if I open them up and they die in the next 30 days that goes against my numbers...so why don't you admit to medicine?" I'm still livid about these cases because while it is true that the patients were likely going to die regardless, the only way they would have any chance at all of making it was by going to the OR. Those surgeons condemned the patients to die because it would hurt their precious statistics. I once, as an intern, was practically screaming at a surgical chief over the phone (if you're in medicine, you know this doesn't happen).
#20
Not a doctor, but I work in a nursing home. Once I had a patient whose son was a doctor friend of a doctor associated with the nursing home. When her health started to decline, the primary doctor called and ordered sublingual morphine solution 40mg Q1 hour. A normal dose for someone who is opiate-naive (which this woman was) is 5mg Q2-4 hours.
I refused to take this order from the MD and called my supervisor who also refused to take the order. We had to involve the medical director for the facility who decided that 40mg was an unethical dose.
#21
I worked at a company that made X-Ray machines. Doctors who didn't want to change the developer chemicals at the regularly scheduled times (to save money) would just crank up the rads when they X-Rayed patients.
LinkTheHylian 11 hours ago
Contrary to popular belief, X-rays do not create X-Men. That's gamma radiation, and they only create Hulks/Leaders/Doc Samsons/Abominations/U-Foes etc.
#22
I work in a pharmacy and a doctor was just recently blacklisted from our pharmacy because he was prescribing his "attractive" female patients high doses of opioids to get them a******d. Apparently he was doing it for years before anyone said anything.
Since being black listed he has also been arrested and charged with 13 felonies.
http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/metro-detroit-doctor-charged-in-prescription-pill-scheme/31079776
#23
When trauma alerts come in during the middle of the night... there is general sense of relief if the patient is d**d on arrive or inoperable. You can tell everyone is hoping the worst just to go back to bed.
Hippopotamuses 11 hours ago
Why FFS is the word dēad censored? Perhaps, if we ignore it, it might go away!
#24
I'm a physician and used to work twelve hour night shifts at this hospital in California. My co-worker (who was also a doctor and admittedly, a young and good looking fellow) and I covered pages from different floors. If there was nothing going on, I would usually be in my call room reading/sleeping/watching TV until a nurse would page me for a problem. My colleague's on call room shared the same wall with mine.
One night, i was reading in my room, when i started hearing my colleague and another woman having s*x. The noises started getting louder and fairly difficult to ignore (sorry but she was pretty loud). Then, in the middle of this charade, I heard his pager go off several times without him answering it.
Eventually, I left the room and called the hospital operator. I asked her who had paged doctor (my colleague's name) and then called the nurse who was trying to get in touch with him.
Turns out, the page was for a patient that was in a serious condition and had to be taken to the ICU. I took care of everything and went back to my room. Later on, I told him that they were paging him for a critically ill patient overhead and that he must have fallen asleep (I didn't say anything about hearing his allegro chamber s*x orchestra). But I think he knew that I knew because he got red and thanked me for covering for him.
#25
This happened when I was a medical student working in the ER. This 20 something male was drunk driving and crashed his car into an elderly couple causing them to require emergent surgery. He was belligerent and walking around naked in the trauma bay. Nurses were trying to get him to calm down and stay in his room and stop yelling. He was calling the nurses b*****s and asking to go to the bathroom so they gave him a urinal. As he was urinating, my attending went up to him and said "I want you on that bed right now." He said "f**k you" so my attending knocked the urinal out of his hand, pis went flying all over the room. He picked him up and threw him on the bed and pushed some rocuronium through his IV to paralyze him. Then he seemed to take his time with intubating him, letting his O2 sat get down into the 40's before finally letting him breath again. I don't know what ended up happening to the guy in the long run. Turns out he had just broken up with his girlfriend and went on a drinking binge. He deserved to be punished for what he did, but I don't think he deserved to be forcibly intubated for no reason other than causing a scene.
Yayheterogeneity 15 hours ago
And nearly k*****g two people. But I agree, the doc should not have done that.
#26
I made an account just for this thread. I've never told anyone else this, but I thought it would be appropriate for self-therapy purposes (ie, getting it off my chest). My brother and I both have practices in separate states - he confessed to me about several months ago that he convinced a mother and son to have s*x with each other for "therapeutic purposes" purely to fulfill his own surreptitious desires. I believe, ethically, he is struggling to come to terms with it. More so than I, I can only hope. I haven't told anyone else until now, but it has been something I've thought about for days on end.
#27
An interesting moral quandary my father, an oncologist, encountered. He had just given a patient a very bad diagnosis, something very much terminal, and not much time left to live. The guy said he was going to go on a spending spree with all his credit cards and gift away a lot of the stuff to loved ones. My dad confides that he technically had an obligation to report such information to credit bureaus or whatever, but after a little thought figured what the hell, let the dying guy have his day. What does reddit think of this?
#28
When I was pregnant for the first time I went the hospital because I was having cramps and was worried about miscarriage. I had blood tests for a few days to make sure my hormone levels were rising and a scan.
During the scan the nurse doing it said "you're not pregnant". I explained about the blood tests conforming I was and she sighed and said "well the baby is probably ectopic". My ex asked what that meant and her exact response was "it means your baby is dead and your wife could rupture and bleed to death in her sleep." Then she turned off the equipment and walked off.
It turned out I just wasn't as far along as I thought, but I did lose the baby anyway three weeks later. It was a missed miscarriage. When they told me I was left in a room for five hours, eventually given a tablet and told to come back in two days with no explanation of what was going to happen.
My mum was also given a crash c section with unsterilsed instruments and ended up with an infection. Her heart stopped and she was advised to not try for anymore children.
LakotaWolf (she/her) 3 hours ago
I've never wanted to have children, but the stories I hear about how maternal déath, miscarriage, stillbirth, and general obstetrical care are treated even here in the US, which is allegedly an "advanced" modern country, is appalling.
#29
My father is a psychiatric nurse and he will openly say how jaded he is by the incompetent people he works with. He has been employed as a registered nurse since the 1970s. But in recent decades the government has slashed the mental health budget, so instead of hiring qualified nurses who command a higher wage, they hire what are essentially babysitters with no experience.
His patients are seriously mentally disabled, not the type who need to be put in a straitjacket and sedated but grown men with the intelligence of 4-year-olds. These babysitters know nothing about restraining them when they get violent, they just cower in the corner and wait for the 1 or 2 nurses in the building.
There's also a lot to be said about the character of these 'babysitters.' My Dad told me about one patient who had a phobia of cicadas, so this arsehole colleague thought is would be funny to catch a cicada and chase the poor patient around the grounds with it.
The worse case of incompetence he told me about happened at this hospital that was located within walking distance from a major 6-lane motorway. Two nurses came in for their night shift. Patients are sleeping so workers on the night shift will watch tv or do anything else to keep themselves awake during quiet periods. These guys had brought in computer equipment with the intention of repairing or building a computer, I don't know. The fact was that they were so engrossed in their task that they failed to notice one patient who had woken up and left the premises. It wasn't until emergency services showed up and told them that there had been a fatal accident on the motorway, that k****d this patient, that these nurses realised anything was amiss.
Neither of them got sacked thanks to the strength of the Nurses Union.
#30
Med4 student here.
During one of my internal medicine clerkship in a small hospital, i get paged to a cardiorespiratory arrest in the cath lab. I arrive there and a whole team is already working (a way outdated) ACLS protocol on a patient that was undergoing PTCA earlier. Apparently the interventional cardiologist has just placed a stent and was withdrawing when the patient had the arrest. After 40-45 minutes of resuscitation the patient did not pick up so I was expecting them to just announce the time of death. That's when it gets "unethical". The whole staff agreed to just send the patient to CCU (knowing he's dead), intubated on ambubag, with a monitor showing a nurse's pulse and oxymetry, and to tell the parents that the intervention was successful and that he needs observation before being discharged to regular floor. The patient was kept in the CCU and the staff would tell the family gradually that he was getting worse, and 2 hours later, they told them that he just died because couldn't tolerate the procedure. All this to protect the cardiologist and so that he keeps a good reputation and record.
After I asked around, they were apparently doing this for every arrest that would happen during catheterization in this hospital...
Note: this post originally had 36 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
What do you think ?
David Paterson 11 hours ago
Two cases above of doctors stealing children to sell them off. That shocks me more than anything else.
Sleepy children love Moon 5 hours ago
Was anyone else having a problem where you would click to see more responses, and it would just send you to a Botox site? It happened to me like three times
David Paterson 11 hours ago
Two cases above of doctors stealing children to sell them off. That shocks me more than anything else.
Sleepy children love Moon 5 hours ago
Was anyone else having a problem where you would click to see more responses, and it would just send you to a Botox site? It happened to me like three times
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