There are laws in place around the practice of medicine that keep us safe. And we all expect that doctors have our best interest in mind. However, that isn’t always the case. Don’t believe me? Take a gander at these 21 stories that will make you want to pray away the sick instead of see the doc.
1. Good Measure
Female colleague (cardiologist) grabbed a sedated man’s penis while he was undergoing surgery. His penis was massive and she grabbed it to show us. She also measured it.
2. Bad judgement
A doctor was just recently blacklisted from our pharmacy because he was prescribing his “attractive” female patients high doses of opioids to get them addicted. Then he would only refill their script if they had sex with him. Apparently he was doing it for years before anyone said anything.
3. Unneeded Caesarian
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).
4. This seems like a nice thing?
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.
5. Being evil
There used to be a psychiatrist who several times seduced his patients while they were at most vulnerable. He made them depend on him and then just use this to get in their pants.
I get that sometimes you can develop feelings for a patient and even start dating later (was not uncommon at the psychiatric ward I was a nurse at), but this was only a psychiatrist being evil.
6. Asleep on the job
My mom worked as a nurse in Brazil for a while and said that the doctors at her hospital would sleep during night shifts and it’d all be up to the nurses. They would get angry if they were awoken and wouldn’t take the nurses seriously, which led to this one guy’s death (despite my mom insisting that they check on him because he looked bad) because they didn’t want to get up.
7. Covered your ass
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 sex. 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 sex orchestra). But I think he knew that I knew because he got red and thanked me for covering for him.
8. BLECH
From a patient perspective I still have trouble with this one:
I was getting a severe wound on my shin cleaned of debris with a scrub brush. The doctor for some reason wasn’t wearing any face protection and managed to splash wound juice into her mouth. Her response was a “pffbt plbbft pbffftt, Ah I got your juices in my mouth!”
I was horrified. Never returned.
9. Stealing Time
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.
10. This is horrible
I’m in Vietnam and see some serious ethics violations by medical professionals here. I can only tell of second hand accounts but I know the person this happened to.
Corruption runs deep here. One of my friends is a local and was engaged to a man she had been with for about two years. Their relationship came to a sudden halt when her mother got cancer. The cancer did not kill the relationship. The doctor did. He told the family that the mom would not be treated in time to fight the cancer due to the number of patients they had to see and the funds available for taking on such cases – medicine is state run here. He assured the family, however, that he would treat my friend’s mom if my friend became his girlfriend. They were “together” for about six months while mom went through chemo. She still died. Imagine telling your SO that you have to break up with him/her because the doctor won’t treat your parent unless you perform sexual favors for him.
