In a list of people least likely to kill you, Doctors would probably come somewhere near the top—just under Nuns but way above Chris Brown. But guess what? Not only is the entire medical profession after your blood, they’re disposing of the population at a faster rate than car crashes, Alzheimer’s or homicide. And it’s all thanks to terrifying things like:

See Also: 10 Monstrous Doctors Who Mutilated Their Patients

In most jobs, screwing up big time means losing a client, back-chatting a customer or accidentally emailing your MLP/Jersey Shore slash fiction to the entire board of directors. If you work in a hospital or pharmacy, chances are it means something a lot worse.

Take the case of pregnant Mareena Silva. After visiting her pharmacist for some antibiotics, she took one only to realize she’d just swallowed a home-abortion drug. Luckily her unborn kid survived. Others haven’t got off so lightly: Amy Francis went into a UK hospital to have a kidney removed, only to die when the surgeon set about extracting her liver. In Italy a mix up between an oxygen and anesthetic tube wound up killing eight people, while an Australian hospital tagged an elderly woman as a middle-aged man, killed her with the wrong prescription then tried to cover it up. According to the Institute of Medicine, mistakes kill around 44,000 US patients a year—a terrifying number that becomes even worse when you realize it’s the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every single day.

Just like politics, the medical profession comes with perks. And by perks I mean ‘bribes’. Seriously: just last year GSK were whacked with a $3bn fine for giving doctors kickbacks to promote their products. And we’re not talking a measly few bucks here and there—doctors who went along for the ride could expect to be flown to five star hotels in places like Bermuda and treated to luxury daytrips while there. Nor was this a one-off: in 2011, Johnson and Johnson was caught throwing money at Greek doctors in an evident misunderstanding of South-European economics, while drug supergiant Pfizer may have even bribed the Chinese government. Currently, at least another four major Pharma companies are facing trial for similar offences—including some of the biggest names in the business.

Most businesses have some aspect of performance-related pay. After all, targets speed up productivity, get lazy asses in gear and improve performance. What’s not to like?

Well, according to this story, government-imposed targets at one UK hospital were so damaging they were actually killing patients. By piling pressure on doctors and managers to achieve unrealistic goals, bosses were simply ensuring patient safety took a back seat—with predictable consequences. In 2008, a Royal College of Nursing survey concluded 78% of nurses felt patient care was compromised by the need to hit these impossible figures, with a further 93% saying they felt under ‘undue pressure’. If there’s one person in your life you really don’t want stressed out to the point of distraction, it’s the one who’s meant to be saving it.

When we get a virus or an infection, most of us go to our doctor, get a fistful of antibiotics and knock it on the head. Simple.

Only it really isn’t. See, antibiotics aren’t big money-spinners, meaning those bribe-factories up there aren’t interested in investing in new ones. Then you have an utterly terrifying phenomenon known as ‘antibiotic resistance’. Put simply, the super-fast process of evolution in bacteria allows strains with resistance to certain drugs to multiply until nearly all of them are immune. Then we’re in trouble: all those nasty Victorian illnesses we thought we wiped out a century or so ago might come back with a vengeance. Already, gonorrhoea and E-coli are shrugging off antibiotics like it ain’t no thang and it might be about to get a whole lot worse. Gee, thanks Darwin.

We all know the scene: the patient lies on the hospital bed, near death’s door. The doctor quietly asks if they would like to try a new ‘experimental’ drug that, though untested, just might work. The tired patient nods. After all, it couldn’t possibly make them worse.

Uh, yeah, about that – turns out there’s a big difference between ending your life in hopeless misery and hopeless agony. In a wide-ranging study, the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that less than a third of experimental drugs had a beneficial effect on the patient, while two thirds resulted in at least one severe or life-threatening side effect. You may be dying anyway, but taking these drugs is more likely to speed the process up than save your life.

We like to think of surgery as a last resort, something hospitals do only when they have to. The idea of someone knocking us out and digging around inside our body for no discernible reason is more than many of us can bear. So look away now.

One report found that 4,000 women a year are opened up to treat benign breast tumors that would never have harmed them in the first place. Given the trauma that often results from such invasive surgery, those numbers aren’t great. If you think that’s bad, wait till you hear about (ex) Dr Ian Paterson: according to this story, he stands accused of opening up and mutilating 450 women because psychosis, that’s why. Equally depressing is this recent story on a Kentucky hospital being sued by 400 patients for performing surgery with the sole intention of raking in the subsequent insurance payouts.

What could possibly be worse than needless surgery? How about neglect so bad it borders on abuse?

A recent report into deaths in UK hospitals found so many instances of death-by-neglect it would be impossible to list them all here. One 22 year old, Kane Gorry, managed to die of thirst in his bed after staff refused to give him water; a thought so awful it could only be topped by the knowledge that 110 others suffered a similar fate last year, while another 43 starved to death. Let me repeat that these are people in hospitals, in developed nations, under supposedly round the clock care. Then there’s the systematic ill-treatment of elderly patients—ranging from bullying to harassment to outright abuse—with complaints totaling over 36,000 in 2012 alone. Keep in mind these are up-to-date figures—meaning that, in 2013, thousands of scumbags still look at vulnerable people in their care, and can think of nothing but hurting them.

Even when not being actively neglectful, some doctors endanger patients through sheer laziness. Long Island North Shore University Hospital was found a few years back to have a hand washing rate of ten percent. Keep in mind we’ve known since 1847 that by washing their hands, doctors can reduce basically all of the death. Wait, it gets worse. According to a report, hundreds of doctors and nurses are neglecting to check routine things like patient blood pressure, either because they forget, or simply can’t be assed. Things have gotten so bad where basic care is concerned, that doctors in a Worcestershire hospital were forced to prescribe tap water just to make sure the nurses bothered to give patients the fluid they needed to survive. I would go on, but honestly some of these stories are just too depressing.

As we all know from hospital dramas and endless reruns of M*A*S*H, sometimes there’s just no way to save a patient. They might be brain dead, in a coma from which they’ll never recover or otherwise impossible to save—and taking up much needed beds. With a heavy heart, doctors consult the family then pull the switch, knowing they did the best they could.

Except for the times they totally didn’t. According to a very scary UK story, some hospitals are pushing patients onto a ‘path for death’ designed to help the terminally ill before they’re ready for it. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, six doctors claimed this procedure was sometimes used to reduce strain on hospital resources, meaning there are medical professionals who put their downtime watching House above their duty to save your life. One disabled member of the UK House of Lords was even told by doctors on a hospital visit that she ‘wouldn’t want to be resuscitated’—something most of us would probably rather decide for ourselves.

After all that, it’s easy to forget that not every doctor is a cross between Jack Kevorkian and Genghis Khan. Some just happen to be genuinely decent people who want nothing more than to help patients. Too bad the rest of their profession is stopping them.

Thanks to things called gagging orders, doctors are often restrained from speaking out against colleagues or hospitals—even if the seats of said hospital are literally dripping in blood. In some states it’s even worse: according to this story, NY doctors are now asking patients to sign these orders—meaning the bozo who endangers your life can take you to court if you try to warn anyone.

But what about those doctors who speak out anyway? Yeah, most of them get their asses handed to them. Out of 26 whistleblowers surveyed in that link, 13 reported significant stress-related illnesses, while 8 lost everything. Of the 2 who managed to cling to their careers, both claimed that—were they given the chance to do it over again—they’d just take the damned bribe. Dr Stephen Bolsin was the only person to speak out against a Bristol hospital that was systematically killing children and was hounded out the country for his effort. Simply put, the system not only doesn’t reward whistleblowers, it actively destroys them, meaning fewer come forward and we remain at risk. Good luck not thinking about that next time you go for a check-up.

Doctors heal us and, if they are not sociopaths, do their best not to hurt us. But doctors work with us when our bodies are weakest. It is inevitable that, sometimes, a doctor’s intervention will kill rather than cure.

10King George V

Kings can usually count on the best of everything. The best food, the best castles, and the best medical treatment. That is why kings generally live longer lives than the peasants they rule over.

King George V of the United Kingdom was actually killed by his status. The king was already dying but not nearly swiftly enough to be convenient. Once he fell into a coma, it seemed that the monarch’s last breath would happen too late for the deadlines of the morning papers. This would result in the king’s passing being reported in the evening papers. To make sure the prestigious morning papers got the story instead, the king’s doctor, Lord Dawson, injected him with cocaine and morphine to speed up his death.

9President Garfield

Being President of the United States definitely takes its toll on health—the before and after photos of presidents show how it ages them. Even worse is the risk of assassination.

President Garfield was shot in 1881 by Charles Guiteau. The assassin’s bullet lodged behind the president’s pancreas but almost certainly was not fatal by itself. What seems to have killed the president was infection caused by his doctors.

Immediately after the shooting, they probed the wound to find the bullet with their fingers. Their unsterilized digits introduced germs that brought on a fever. They tried again and again to find the bullet, each time without sterilizing hands or tools, one doctor even puncturing the president’s liver with his finger. Eighty days after the shooting, the president succumbed to infection.

8Sigmund Freud

Not all famous people who die at the hands of their doctors are the victims of misconduct, ignorance, or malice. Sigmund Freud is often quoted as saying, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” but other times, a cigar is cause of oral cancer The psychiatrist was fond of his phallic nicotine delivery systems, smoking up to 20 a day.

For the last decades of his life Freud suffered from painful cancers of the mouth. When he came to the end of his life, Freud told his doctor how he wanted to exit the world—painlessly. At Freud’s request, his doctor eased his passing with injections of morphine.

7President Washington

Of all the medical terrors that may face us, a sore throat is probably not the first that comes to mind.

George Washington went out riding one day in the snow, dined without changing from his wet clothes, and the next day reported a sore throat. When an infection in the president’s throat swelled it uncomfortably, his doctor gave the preferred treatment of the times—he bled him. When this failed, a second doctor raised a blister on his throat to draw out liquids. Then he was bled again. Then an enema was given. Then he was forced to vomit. All these interventions weakened the president, allowing the infection to worsen.

Thanks to the tender ministrations of his doctors, Washington’s last words included: “Doctor, I die hard.”

6Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson was preparing for a new world tour when he suddenly died in 2009. The cause of his death was a powerful anesthetic, propofol.

You may have encountered propofol if you have had a general anesthetic. Jackson’s doctor was using it to treat the singer’s insomnia caused by the stress from the upcoming tour. Using propofol to get a night of sleep is like using an atom bomb to dig a vegetable patch. Sure, you will get the job done, but your cabbages will glow in the dark.

The doctor was sentenced to four years in prison for involuntary manslaughter and was released after two.

5Joan Rivers

The comedienne Joan Rivers was never shy about talking about her cosmetic surgery. She played on it in her routines, joking that “I wish I had a twin, so I could know what I’d look like without plastic surgery.” In 2014, she went into hospital for a routine operation. Complications arose, and she died. Many assumed that this was a case of those who live by the scalpel dying by the scalpel.

In fact, Rivers died after a botched examination of her throat, nothing to do with her devotion to plastic surgery. In 2016, Rivers’s doctors settled a malpractice suit and accepted responsibility for her death.

4Abraham Lincoln

Everyone knows what killed President Lincoln. While he was enjoying a trip to the theater, John Wilkes Booth shot him at point-blank range in the head. Even today, such a wound is likely to be deadly. Case closed?

Not quite. In the Civil War, many people had taken bullets to the brain and lived, so just because it was a dreadful wound does not mean it was a fatal one. It is possible that medical treatment rather than the gun finished off the president.

Doctor Charles Leale was in the theater at the time of the shooting and was the first to reach the president. He reported, “The coagula I easily removed and passed the little finger of my left hand through the perfectly smooth opening made by the ball.” Massive damage was done by the bullet but the probing of the wound, repeated later by other doctors, may have caused deadly blood loss.

3King Charles II

We have seen that position and power is no guarantee of flawless medical care. King Charles II of England suffered from an overabundance of doctors. Fourteen medics cared for him in his final days, and all wished to try their treatment on the king when the king suffered some sort of fit while shaving. The fit was only the beginning of his ordeal.

He was bled, blistered, bled again, given an emetic, had his head shaved and blistered, given an enema, and dressed with plasters made of pigeon droppings. That was only the first day of his treatment. Over the next few days, ever more blood was taken, and stranger remedies were tried.

The Merry Monarch died in pain but still found time for courtesy. When visitors were allowed to see him, he apologized: “You must pardon me, gentlemen, for being a most unconscionable time a-dying.”

2Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is one of the masterpieces of historical writing. There is, however, a fact about the historian that is often left out of the history books. Gibbon suffered from a swelling of the testicles.

People today may laugh over the absurd tightness of skinny jeans, but they have nothing on the tightness of breaches in the 18th century. There was no disguising the ailment. Gibbon decided to have the illness dealt with. “If the business goes off smoothly, I shall be delivered of a small burden (it is almost as big as a small child).”

Four quarts of watery fluid were drained off in the first operation, which was repeated several times, each drawing out similar amounts. While these treatments relieved the painful and embarrassing condition, they also caused an infection that killed the man.

1Charles II Of Navarre

The second Charles II on this list suffered a bad death, even by the standards of a man known as Charles the Bad (a sobriquet he earned by playing the English and French against each other during the Hundred Years War and switching sides whenever it seemed advantageous).

When Charles fell ill, unable to use his arms and legs, his doctors took an unorthodox approach to curing him. They prescribed wrapping the monarch in brandy-soaked cloth. To give him the maximum exposure, the king was sewn into the cloths at night.

One night, the lady sewing him in had a length of thread left. Instead of cutting off the excess, she decided to burn it off with a candle. As anyone but the lady might have expected, the candle set the alcohol-impregnated bed aflame, killing the king. According to the chronicler Jean Froissart, the king lingered in agony for two weeks before dying, giving moralists a fitting end to the story of Charles the Bad.

As a modern culture, we tend to put our faith wholeheartedly in doctors. They’re the experts, and more often than not we take their advice without question. But what we don’t take into account is that many of these doctors either don’t have a clue or actively withhold information that could be putting your life in jeopardy. And if you think that sounds sensationalist, take a look at these facts—facts that doctors know about but which they conveniently forget to mention as you sign the bill.

10 Cancer Isn’t Always Cancer

The worst possible outcome of a trip to the doctor is a diagnosis of the Big C. We’re so terrified of it that even the word is taboo in some places, and the medical community lives by one maxim: early diagnosis. The earlier you find the cancer, the more easily you can treat it. But such enthusiasm can easily lead to false positives, and treating something that isn’t there can be dangerous.

We’re not just making that up. Mammograms are famous for misdiagnosing breast cancer, since every little anomaly in the breast can look like a tumor. The most common misdiagnosis is with DCIS, or Ductal Carcinoma In Situ. Despite the “carcinoma” in there, DCIS isn’t really cancerous ; only rarely does it turn into cancer, and practically everyone with DCIS survives, no matter what kind of treatment they get.

But when doctors quote cancer statistics, they usually lump in DCIS, which now accounts for about 30 percent of breast cancer “cases” in the US. And when faced with that option, most people choose to undergo “needless and sometimes disfiguring and harmful treatments” to get rid of something that, statistically, will do less harm than the treatments themselves.

9Some Vaccines Fail

In 2012, the US saw the worst outbreak of whooping cough since 1955. And that’s strange, considering that we’ve been vaccinating against it for over 50 years. Whooping cough is caused by two types of bacteria, Bordatella pertussis and Bortatella parapertussis, but the vaccine—the DTaP—is only designed to fight the first one, B. Pertussis. Which doesn’t seem too bad. Getting rid of half the problem is better than doing nothing, right?

Not quite. In all these years of exclusively pounding away at one of the causes, the second type of bacteria has been flourishing, to the point that receiving the vaccine causes B. parapertussis lung infections to grow 40 times as large as they would normally. And recently, the vaccine has also been less effective on the things it’s actually supposed to treat. In 2011, the CDC nearly doubled their recommendations for the vaccine, saying you need three initial shots of DTaP followed by three additional shots if you expect it to work.

That’s because vaccines can actually strengthen viruses. They can’t rewire the human genome (and you can dismiss links to autism as alarmist nonsense) but vaccines can stimulate mutations in the viruses they fight. China found that out in the worst possible way when their Hepatitis B vaccines caused the virus to begin mutating twice as fast as it normally would. We’ve been seeing the same thing happen with the flu virus—vaccines basically just fuel the virus’s instinct to survive.

8 Prescription Drugs Can Cause Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes is caused when your body either doesn’t make enough insulin or can’t effectively use all the insulin it makes. The result is a buildup of glucose, or sugar, in the bloodstream, which starts damaging nerves and blood vessels over time. About 2.3 million Americans have type 2 diabetes, and the numbers rise every year.

It turns out that some of the most commonly prescribed drugs, like antidepressants, might be causing it. In 2011, there were 46.7 million prescriptions given out to treat depression in the UK alone. When researchers at the University of Southampton looked at the numbers, they found that people who took two of the most common types of antidepressants, SSRIs and tricyclic antidepressants, were twice as likely to develop diabetes. And sure, those findings were released in 2013, but we’ve known about the link since 2008 and yet millions more are prescribed on a monthly basis.

And it gets worse—some of the most common drugs used to treat ADHD in children can triple the risk of type 2 diabetes. More often than not, that’s a lifelong condition, and kids don’t even get the choice to refuse.

7 Some Medications Increase Cancer Risk

Now that we’ve assuaged some of your worries about cancer, let’s go ahead and kick everything back up again.

Blood pressure medications can almost triple your risk of aggressive breast cancer. In the US alone, about 58.6 million people take medication for high blood pressure, so you’d think the cancer link would be more well-known.

The study that discovered this relationship looked at 1,763 women with breast cancer. Those who used a particular type of blood pressure medicine—calcium channel blockers—were 2.5 times more likely to develop cancer. The risk is greater in elderly women over the age of 55, and it likely happens because calcium channel blockers prevent cells from dying. If cells can’t complete their normal life cycle, they go rogue and become cancerous.

But even that wouldn’t be a problem if the medication weren’t so grossly over-prescribed. In a review of one hospital, 150 out of 161 doctors prescribed calcium channel blockers to their patients. But how many of those doctors told their patients about the risks? Only eight. That’s a potentially deadly lapse in duty.

6 Aspirin Can Cause Internal Bleeding

One of the more common pieces of advice from doctors is that you should take a low dose of aspirin every day. The idea is that it serves as a maintenance treatment to prevent blood clots, which can cause heart attacks and strokes. But what they don’t tell you is the small fact that doing so can trigger massive internal bleeding.

Researchers found that, out of 10,000 people, a daily dose of aspirin prevented 46 people from dying over the course of 10 years. But they also found that 49 people out of the same 10,000 experienced major internal bleeding, and another 117 started bleeding in their gastrointestinal tract. So there may be some benefits, but there may be an even higher chance that something will go horribly wrong.

On top of that, aspirin doesn’t actually work for everyone. Some people have aspirin-resistant platelets, which negates any positive effect you might get from the aspirin. But since we have no way to test for that, doctors never know if they’re recommending a dud treatment or not.

5 Heartburn Drugs Have Deadly Side Effects

One of the main problems with medications is that, while they usually do a decent job of treating what they’re supposed to treat, they often cause horrible side effects. And even though it’s the doctor’s job to tell people about those side effects, sometimes that just doesn’t happen. For example, proton pump inhibitors, a type of heartburn drug marketed under the brand names Nexium and Prilosec, have been linked to bone decay, birth defects, and an inability to absorb vitamin B12, which can lead to permanent neurological damage.

Despite that, Nexium was the single most prescribed drug in 2012, and in many cases it doesn’t even work. It’s usually prescribed to treat Barrett’s esophagus, which is when excess stomach acid burns the lining of the esophagus, but the pills don’t do a thing for the condition. Pediatricians have even started prescribing these meds to infants, even though it’s been proven that doing so can actually cause permanent intestinal disorders.

4 “Safe” X-Rays Still Cause Cancer

It’s a well-known fact that gamma radiation and X-rays carry the risk of kickstarting cancer. Now, we’re constantly exposed to radiation just by being alive, so there’s a general guideline for “safe exposure” to X-rays, which the medical profession sticks to when they look for broken bones or give you a mammogram. Radiation is measured in units called sieverts, and every year you’re exposed to about 2.4 millisieverts, just from general background radiation; by contrast, a mammogram only gives you about 0.7 millisieverts.

The difference, though, is that medical X-rays pop that radiation into you in the space of minutes, whereas it takes a whole year to absorb your typical background radiation. And it’s a huge difference, even with low-radiation “safe” X-rays. In the UK, diagnostic X-rays cause about 700 cases of cancer each year. And it could be even worse than that—some researchers claim that the majority of cancer cases were either caused or aggravated by medical X-rays.

And to top it all off, women who get X-rays when pregnant have been found more likely to give birth to children with cancer. And a CT scan is the go-to diagnostic tool for young children, which, you guessed it, is just another type of X-ray.

3 Doctors Get Paid When You Buy Certain Drugs

Conspiracy theorists aren’t shy about proclaiming the evils of Big Pharma. But conspiracy theory is one thing, and documented proof is a whole different beast. When the Harvard Law School took a closer look, they realized that they didn’t have to dig very deep at all to discover that doctors are paid handsomely to prescribe certain drugs, even when those drugs turn out to be harmful.

One of the most publicized recent cases was Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, who began diagnosing two-year-old toddlers with bipolar disorder and prescribing strong antipsychotics that were never approved by the FDA for children under 10. The manufacturer of the antipsychotics paid him $1.6 million. Then there’s Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg, who began prescribing an abortion drug to treat depression—he owned $4.8 million of stock in the company that produced the drug.

And then you have Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff, who received $500,000 to advertise as safe a drug that can cause seizures and paralysis The fact is, doctors are allowed to prescribe any drug for any illness, no matter what the drug was originally intended to treat. We’re not making a blanket statement saying all doctors take money to prescribe questionable treatments—but how do you know which ones do?

2 Pandemic Scares Are Over-Hyped

Who can forget the swine flu pandemic in 2009 and 2010? When the World Health Organization called for a state of global emergency, the world went haywire. Lines for the vaccine stretched for blocks, and doctors everywhere told people to seek immediate treatment.

Over the course of about 10 months, pharmaceutical companies raked in £6.5 billion (about $10.5 billion in 2010) from vaccine sales. Doctors tied to the vaccine’s manufacturers were 8.4 times more likely to recommend the vaccine to their patients. And not only recommend—they were more likely to publicly hype the dangers of the flu in the media, which immeasurably contributed to the state of panic.

And strangely, doctors who were being paid by pharmaceutical companies were also more likely to volunteer information to the press. That doesn’t seem like much of a difference, but it’s these quoted experts that we tend to believe in a news article. In the end, about 17,000 people died from swine flu, as opposed to the 46,000 that die every year from the normal flu. Surely the low numbers were due to the mass vaccinations—rather than, say, the fact that the disease was just a common mutation artificially inflated to terror-inducing proportions.

1 Registered Sex Offenders And Violent Criminals

Your doctor doesn’t have to disclose his criminal history, and usually that wouldn’t be considered a problem. Between the strict admission policies of most medical schools and the vague notion that hospitals probably screen their employees, who would even think to ask? Well, maybe you should.

In November 2013, the UK’s General Medical Council, or GMC, released a database with the criminal histories of physicians in the United Kingdom. It turned out that almost 800 practicing doctors held criminal records, including 31 who were arrested for assault and 330 arrested for drunk driving. The rest of them? Crimes range from theft to drug trafficking, and they’re under zero legal obligation to let their patients know about it.

And it’s not exactly rare. There’s the rapist surgeon working in Miami, and the New York doctor who was caught trying to meet a young boy for sex, and a Scottish physician who had reams of child pornography stored on his computer.

Who’s really taking care of you?

Any condition that causes painful symptoms is obviously quite frustrating, but imagine how magnified that frustration becomes when a doctor expresses that the pain is just “in your head.” Such is the case with the following 10 conditions, all of which cause painful and sometimes debilitating physical symptoms yet are believed to be completely psychological in nature.

10Exploding Head Syndrome

The condition known as EHS causes sufferers to perceive “a sense of explosion in the head, confined to the hours of sleep, which is harmless but very frightening for the sufferer.” The perception of explosion often occurs as the sufferer is falling asleep but may also cause the sufferer to violently awaken in the middle of sleep. Other symptoms include flashes of light, an intense feeling of heat, chest pain, and the feeling of an electrical sensation throughout the body.

While the condition has been around as far back as the late 1800s, there is little that a medical doctor can offer in the way of help for the physical symptoms generated by EHS. So far, doctors have found that simple reassurance is seemingly the best treatment, and one sufferer’s symptoms ceased due to his doctor’s assurance that his EHS was “nothing more than an inconvenience.” Causes for EHS are believed to include common issues such as stress and fatigue, with other sleep disorders also considered as likely playing a role.

9Fibromyalgia

There are a host of physical symptoms associated with fibromyalgia, including widespread pain throughout the body, fatigue, depression, and headaches. Despite this, there is still the belief in the medical community that the condition is all in the minds of the sufferers. According to Gerard Mesill, M.D., “People with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) suffer not only from constant, widespread pain, but they also sometimes face judgment and distrust from medical professionals who doubt if their condition is real. They are labeled as annoying and needy. In the literal sense, insult is added to injury.”

There is no lab testing available to confirm whether a patient has fibromyalgia, and while doctors used to use a “tender point exam,” all that is necessary for a diagnosis is for the patient to have “widespread pain for more than three months—with no underlying medical condition that could cause the pain.” Doctors do use blood testing to eliminate other conditions as a possible cause, and though recent estimates have indicated that five million people suffer from fibromyalgia in the US alone, there are still many doctors who express disbelief at the existence of the condition altogether.

8Somatization Disorder

Somatization disorder is particularly troubling to patients since the disorder creates an endless cycle of widespread pain due to anxiety over the condition. The physical symptoms of the disorder are far too many to list but include amnesia, diarrhea, dizziness, headaches, paralysis, and changes in vision. While the symptoms of the disorder are seemingly limitless, the absence of any identifiable physical cause has led many doctors to believe that the disorder is simply psychological, and it is therefore frequently dismissed altogether.

Because of the lack of an identifiable physical cause, it is recommended that patients suffering from the disorder undergo some form of psychotherapy and perhaps antidepressant medications as well. Some studies have theorized that this disorder and several other similar disorders may be rooted in neurocircuitry.

7Conversion Disorder

While the issues associated with conversion disorder are quite severe, the circumstances surrounding the disorder are still less bleak than in the 17th century, when many sufferers of conversion disorder—then referred to as hysteria—were thought to have been practicing witchcraft and were therefore executed by being burned at the stake. Though the ancient Greeks were far less punitive to sufferers of the disorder, they believed that it occurred as a result of the “uterus wandering into the body.”

Though many years have passed since sufferers were thought to have a “wandering uterus” or have been practicing witchcraft, the belief is still that conversion disorder is a psychological disorder that results in some very serious physical symptoms, including seizures, blindness, and paralysis. Those afflicted with conversion disorder have often experienced something traumatic, and this trauma is often repressed in some manner. The disorder is not common, as it is estimated to affect only 0.03 percent of the population.

6Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Sufferers of chronic fatigue syndrome have a great deal of difficulty getting an accurate diagnosis of their condition and therefore are often forced to deal with the very real physical symptoms without adequate treatment. The feeling that chronic fatigue syndrome—which results in serious and debilitating physical symptoms—is just a psychological disorder is so widespread that the Institute of Medicine felt it necessary to “put to rest, once and for all, the idea that this is just psychosomatic or that people were making this up, or that they were just lazy.”

According to the report issued by the Institute of Medicine, as many as 2.5 million Americans deal with symptoms caused by chronic fatigue syndrome, including “profound fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, sleep abnormalities, autonomic manifestations, pain, and other symptoms that are made worse by exertion of any sort.”

Due to doubts regarding the very existence of chronic fatigue syndrome, the report noted that less than 33 percent of medical schools even include the condition in curricula, and the condition is not so much as mentioned in 60 percent of medical textbooks, leading sufferers of the condition to encounter “skepticism of health care providers about the serious nature of [chronic fatigue syndrome] and the misconception that it is a psychogenic illness or even a figment of the patient’s imagination.”

5Retired Husband Syndrome

This particular disorder is almost entirely localized in Japan, where wives often experience several physical symptoms that only occur following their husband’s retirement. Sufferers of retired husband syndrome, or RHS, deal with physical symptoms that may include ulcers, polyps, rashes, and headaches, and it is all caused by the increased presence of their husband at the home.

The physiological ailments that develop are caused by stress, and that stress is often due to the very strict gender roles that have existed in Japan for centuries. The effects of RHS have resulted in a divorce rate that has increased significantly. Between 1985 and 2000, the rate of divorce among couples married for longer than 20 years doubled.

Though many women in Japan are finding themselves afflicted with physical symptoms, doctors have not been able to find any other medical cause for those symptoms other than the psychological stress of the retirement of their husbands.

4Psychogenic Dystonia

Psychogenic dystonia is a movement disorder that causes the muscles to contract painfully and involuntarily without any identifiable physical cause for the issue. While many in the medical field believe this type of dystonia develops as a part of a conversion disorder and is rooted in a psychological cause, recent studies may have revealed that the cause may be neurological instead.

While some forms of dystonia are caused by a gene mutation, psychogenic dystonia sufferers have no such mutation. They do, however, have “markedly different brain activity,” as determined through a study using PET brain scans to measure levels of activity in specific regions of the brain. So while the very name of the disorder implies that there is a psychological cause (psychogenic disorders were once referred to as hysterical disorders), it appears that researchers may have identified a neurological cause in those suffering from the apparently poorly named psychogenic dystonia.

3Pseudocyesis

The physical symptoms—abdominal enlargement, the sensation of fetal movement, lactation, and even labor pains, among others—all seem to obviously point to pregnancy. Yet with this particular condition, such is not the case. Pseudocyesis, or false pregnancy, can afflict both women and men and is completely rooted in the psychological realm. The condition is listed in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and it has been found to be most common in countries in which medical care for pregnancy is not sought until the later stages of a pregnancy.

A study published in the US National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine delineated some of the common factors among those who experience pseudocyesis, noting that “pseudocyesis shares many endocrine traits with both polycystic ovarian syndrome and major depressive disorder, although the endocrine traits are more akin to polycystic ovarian syndrome than to major depressive disorder,” and that there is a tendency among those experiencing false pregnancy to have “increased sympathetic nervous system activity.”

2Chronic Lyme Disease

Lyme disease is a very treatable condition that usually requires about four weeks of treatment using antibiotics. The disease, which is caused by a tick bite, is particularly prevalent in the northeast portion of the United States but can be found in numerous other locations. Chronic Lyme disease is different, however, and though many doctors are dubious as to its existence, a recent study claimed that its effects can last “4.7–9 years” and includes symptoms such as “persistent musculoskeletal pain, neurocognitive symptoms, or dysesthesia.”

Even though the study professes to have proved that chronic Lyme disease indeed exists, other doctors remain doubtful and believe that any improvement in the symptoms patients experience is nothing more than a psychosomatic response and is simply the result of the placebo effect. While many doctors dismiss patients claiming to have chronic Lyme disease as hypochondriacs, others believe that any physical symptoms experienced by a patient may be the result of a co-infection, and that doctors treating patients for chronic Lyme disease are harming the patient by not identifying the true cause.

1Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures

This particular condition is quite often mistaken for epilepsy, resulting in frequent misdiagnoses. As the name implies, psychogenic non-epileptic seizures are not caused by the same issue that results in epileptic seizures but rather by some form of psychological distress. The main identifying factor for psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, or PNES, is through the observation of seizures in which there are “unusual features, such as type of movements, duration, triggers and frequency.”

PNES sufferers often have endured some sort of traumatic event that serves as the root cause of the disorder, and because of the fact that there are inherent difficulties in dealing with the disorder, individuals with PNES must often endure an arduous process in treatment. According to Dr. Selim R. Benbadis, the director of Comprehensive Epilepsy Program, “In addition to being common, psychogenic symptoms pose an uncomfortable and often frustrating challenge, both in diagnosis and management.” As with many conditions that doctors believe are all in the patient’s head, PNES often represents quite a significant hardship for those suffering from the syndrome.

J. Francis Wolfe is a freelance writer and a noted dreamer of dreams. He aspires to one day live in a cave high in the mountains where he can write poetry no one will ever see.

We often expect a drug prescription when we visit a doctor. However, physicians seem to be gradually shifting from solely recommending the use of medications to prescribing other unconventional things. These bizarre prescriptions could be issued alone or to supplement a medication or some other treatment.

These newer treatments include playing, cycling, singing, visiting museums, bird-watching, and even consuming alcohol. Cool! At least we may get a perfect excuse to miss work and do what we love at the same time. These prescriptions were all issued by real doctors and backed by state and even federal health departments, so they are not some fraudulent moneymaking scheme.

10 Guinness

Guinness has always been promoted for its health benefits because it contains several medicinal properties including antioxidant compounds that may prevent heart attacks. It also contains iron. A pint of Guinness contains 3 percent of the 19 mg per day iron requirement for an adult.

This is why Guinness used to be prescribed to pregnant women and patients recovering from surgery. Due to the beer’s iron content, free cans of Guinness are also given to Irish blood donors right after they donate blood. As if that’s not enough, Guinness also contains phytoestrogen, which improves mental abilities, prevents obesity, and makes bones denser.

Little wonder that Australian doctors prescribed Guinness for a patient in 2017. The patient was Dave Conway, an Irishman from Dublin—the home of Guinness. And what could be more Irish than a bottle of chilled Guinness Extra Stout?

Conway had ended up in the hospital after falling from a seven-story construction site in Brisbane, Australia. He landed on his feet, causing horrific injuries to his feet and body. He underwent 26 surgeries, which included amputations of both legs below the knee. Conway was learning to use a wheelchair when his doctors issued him a prescription for a pint of Guinness a day.^[1]

9 Playing

We would all agree that children nowadays don’t play as much as they did a few decades ago. This is probably because many parents erroneously believe that play is just another avenue for children to run around and get dirty. Besides, many children also prefer watching television these days instead of playing.

Physicians say that a lack of play is damaging to a child’s health because play is important for learning, creativity, reducing stress, and ensuring mental and all-around development. This is why the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advised physicians to regularly issue prescriptions for play for children.

AAP and the CDC advise a minimum of one hour of play per day and another hour of some other physical activity. However, doctors often write the prescriptions as “Play Every Day.”^[2] At least, children now have one more excuse to get dirty.

8 Cycling

You are not motivated to cycle often? Your doctor has got you covered. For example, doctors in Cardiff (UK) and Boston (US) are allowed to prescribe cycling to patients who are not getting enough exercise or need to lose weight.

Physicians will issue the prescription along with a membership card of the partner bike-sharing business where it will be redeemed. In Cardiff, the prescription is redeemed at nextbike free of charge. Physicians in either city are allowed to write six-months-long, 30-minutes-a-day cycling prescriptions for their patients.

In Boston, the prescription is redeemed at Blue Bikes (originally Hubway). Initially, Hubway charged $85 a year for its bike-sharing services. However, the prescription was worth $80 for low-income patients, who were responsible for paying the remaining $5.^[3]

7 Bird-Watching And Strolling By The Beach

In 2018, the National Health Service of Shetland, Scotland, revealed its plans to allow doctors to prescribe bird-watching to patients with chronic and debilitating diseases like diabetes, mental illness, and heart disease. Doctors can also write prescriptions for the patient to stroll by the beach or just wander around.

Patients issued a bird-watching prescription will receive a tour organized by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. They will also receive calendars and lists of walking routes complete with the birds and plants they could find on the way.

Patients who receive prescriptions to visit the beach will spend their time watching the seabirds or finding oyster shells in the sand. Alternatively, they could walk up the hills to watch the birds. During the winter, patients would be allowed to visit select locations where they could enjoy the strong ocean winds.^[4]

6 Gardening

In 2016, it was reported that the UK National Health Service (NHS) was considering offering gardening prescriptions to patients suffering from cancer, obesity, and a range of heart and mental problems, including dementia. According to the NHS, gardening and several other outdoor activities improve sleep and reduce loneliness, anxiety, stress, and depression.

Gardening also aids recovery, makes patients active, and gives them a sense of fulfillment. A study revealed that dementia patients near or in gardens were 19 percent less likely to resort to violence than those who did not visit gardens. In fact, at the time of the study, violence among dementia patients who did not visit gardens increased sevenfold.

Interestingly, the program was already in existence in areas like Bromley and Lambeth (both in London) at the time that the NHS was planning to make it nationwide. In Lambeth, the gardens were established on hospital grounds where patients spent their time growing food. They sold their harvests to the hospital, which used them to make meals for other patients.^[5]

5 Singing, Music, Sports, Arts, And Other Hobbies

The UK National Health Service is also contemplating allowing doctors to write music prescriptions for dementia patients. According to Matt Hancock, UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the plan was part of the government’s attempt to reduce the persistent problem of “over-medicalizing the population.”

The government reached the decision after observing that dementia patients who sang and listened to music appeared less distressed and took less medication. In another study organized by Hull’s stroke recovery service and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, almost 90 percent of stroke sufferers experienced improved health after they were treated to music therapy.

The stroke patients also suffered less dizziness and anxiety and fewer seizures. They slept and concentrated better than they used to and showed improved cognitive abilities. Physicians in Gloucestershire also prescribed singing to patients with lung problems.

Besides singing and music, UK doctors may prescribe sports, arts, and other hobbies of a patient as part of their treatment. Hancock mentioned that, by 2023, the NHS would allow doctors to prescribe “community activities” and related pastimes for patients suffering from loneliness.^[6]

4 Museum Visits

In 2018, new legislation allowed doctors in Montreal to prescribe museum visits for their patients. To make the experience sweeter, patients were issued free tickets and allowed to visit along with their friends, relatives, or caregivers. The program was launched in partnership with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA).

According to Nathalie Bondil, the director of MMFA, the program will work because museum visits have a positive effect on the nervous system. Helene Boyer, the vice president of Medecins francophones du Canada (MdFC), added that a visit to the museum increased the secretion of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which boosts mood.

Boyer said that walking around the museum was equivalent to exercising for elderly people and for those suffering from chronic pain. She added that viewing art also had a positive effect on people suffering from potentially deadly conditions like cancer.^[7]

3 Electricity

Even in medical circles, doctors are often criticized for writing drug prescriptions for almost every medical condition under the Sun. This has become so normal that patients expect to receive medication prescriptions when they visit a doctor. Some patients even start to doubt a doctor’s credibility if this doesn’t happen.

Well! Doctors are slowly becoming aware that not all medical conditions require a drug prescription. Instead, patients could receive something as mundane as an electricity prescription for their health problems. This does not mean that doctors will have their staff administer huge jolts of electricity to their patients. Nope! The shocks are so weak that the patient will not feel them.

To be clear, the procedure is not available yet. However, scientists believe that it will work because the human body works on electricity. Our brains often send weak electrical signals to our nerves to order parts of our bodies to perform certain functions. This is the reason why nerve injuries often lead to paralysis—the paralyzed body part is unable to receive signals.

Scientists plan to send the signals from an electrical device implanted in the body. Besides managing nerve damage, scientists also intend to use it to treat other health conditions like diabetes and heart problems. This is achieved by using electrical signals to make the pancreas produce insulin or to increase or decrease the rate at which the heart beats.^[8]

2 Food

Not all patients need drugs. Some just need a perfect diet. However, they could not get food prescriptions until California doctors moved in to change that. Under the program, Food is Medicine, California doctors are allowed to issue prescriptions for food. There is a snag, though. The prescriptions are only planned for 1,000 poor patients suffering from congestive heart failure.

The program is based on a 2013 study by Philadelphia nonprofit Metropolitan Area Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance (MANNA). That year, the nonprofit gave three square meals and a snack to each of 65 patients suffering from congestive heart failure.

Twelve months later, the nonprofit discovered that the study group had spent less on health care than they used to do. Their average monthly medical costs also declined to $28,183 from $38,937 before the program.

Patients involved in the study also visited hospitals only half as much as the control group and had shorter stays at the hospital whenever they were admitted. They were also likelier than other patients to be sent home after receiving treatment rather than going to rehab or some other specialized treatment center.

The program probably worked because congestive heart disease patients often require specialized meals with low salt content to manage their conditions. However, they often find it difficult to get these meals because we have lots of high-salt meals like chips out there.^[9]

1 Park Visits

In 2015, the South Dakota Department of Health and the state’s Game, Fish and Parks Department launched a limited pilot program that allowed doctors to write prescriptions for park visits for their patients.

Patients who received the prescriptions randomly visited any park or recreation area owned by the state. A few other US cities have similar park prescription programs—for example, Baltimore, which calls it “Docs in the Park,” and Albuquerque, which calls it “Prescription Trails.”^[10]

Prescriptions do not always lead to the pharmacy. These days, a doctor’s scribble can take you into virtual worlds and fake surgery. The homeless are also prescribed homes and addicts can pick up their heroin. Even those who bother their GPs too much run the risk of being carted off to Bingo or given Bollywood dancing lessons.

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Corpse Medicines That Turned Patients Into Cannibals

10 Depression – Books

In the United Kingdom, doctors can now prescribe reading. Should a patient with depression need treatment, they can get a prescription paper from their physician for “bibliotherapy.” However, this ticket is not a backstage pass to grab any book. Given only to those with moderate depression, it can be handed over to a librarian in exchange for specific reads. Forget about your favorite Harry Potter tome. The titles are chosen by the doctor and relate to self-help topics involving depression, anxiety, OCD, diet and feeling better.

The hope is that sufferers would feel less isolated and experience a solution-providing catharsis. Bibliotherapy already has a good track record among children. Books explaining death, divorce and other difficult life issues to kids have been around for decades. The therapy cannot cure depression on its own but might provide another way to help manage the condition.^[1]

9 Healthier Lifestyles – Community Gardening

The National Health Service (NHS) is turning people to “green prescriptions.” No, this is not marijuana. The term refers to bonding with nature to reap the medical benefits. However, in this case, the focus is more on community gardening.

The individual can enjoy less loneliness, anxiety, and depression. But what purpose does a bunch of gardeners serve together? A group project encourages better habits. One is more inclined to stay with a social project over time, foster a sense of community and even walk more if the garden can be reached on foot. Since many community crops produce vegetables, people also enjoy fresh produce that is free or cheaper than store-bought. Planning and maintaining the garden also helps people to think and communicate better. A successful project can even boost the environment. Growing trees consume harmful carbon from the air while also providing a haven for birds and wildlife.^[2]

8 Mental And Physical Illnesses – Museum Visits

In 2018, the Francophone Association of Doctors in Canada (MfdC) asked physicians a curious thing. Would they treat patients to a museum as part of their treatment? Over 100 doctors signed up for the program. The unconventional initiative is based on evidence that visual art has a positive influence on health in general.

A doctor will provide a free access card to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA). The prescription allows two adults and two children to visit the museum together. This is an additional perk. While the patient views the art, they can also spend some time with their family or friends. Being social in a safe space erases the stress that aggravates many conditions.

Shepherding people into a museum as a medical treatment is a world first. Even better, the doctors can suggest it for a wide spectrum of conditions, including trauma, anxiety, depression, epilepsy, autism and Alzheimer’s. Basically, most mental and physical ailments could benefit from this program.^[3]

7 Health Management – Nature

After a successful trial run, doctors in Scotland can now legally release their patients into the wild. Since 2018, nature is an official prescription to help treat an existing condition or to reduce the risk of developing a disease. These range from diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, and stress. This may sound insane but numerous studies have found that nature has a beneficial effect on the human mind and body.

The program is called “Nature Prescriptions.” When a doctor decides a person needs it, they hand the patient a pamphlet explaining how nature is a powerful healing force. This calendar also highlights things to do at certain times of the year. During January, lichen hunting is recommended, while February invites gardening and dogs are best walked in March. Other suggestions include cloud adoration and hurling rocks into the ocean after inscribing them with worries. Patients are also encouraged to use their imaginations when sauntering outdoors to soak up what nature has to offer. Hiking, listening to birds or enjoying the wind are just some of the options that could lower stress levels.^[4]

6 Mental And Heart Health – Bike Rides

In 2019, Wales launched a pilot project to improve cardiovascular health. Two medical centers in the capital of Cardiff has been authorized to prescribe bike rides. Not only does regular cycling cut the risk of dying from heart disease by 52 percent but it also brightens the spirit. Needless to say, bicycles also do not pollute the air like cars and buses.

The health initiative allows doctors to give patients a six-month subscription to a bike-rental company in their area. In Europe, rented bicycles can cost up to £10 ( around $13) a day. This is not encouraging for those wishing to pedal their way to better health. The six-month subscription allows anyone to zip around the city for free. The program is the first of its kind in the United Kingdom but could lead to bigger things. Should it prove successful, the UK plans to add more out-of-the-box activities to complement conventional treatments.^[5]

5 Various Conditions – Placebos And Fake Surgery

In 2011, the German Medical Association (BÄK) gathered information about placebos. The report found that half of all German physicians prescribe placebos and as many as 88 percent in Bavaria. Contrary to what one might initially think, BÄK did not go ballistic.

The placebos included vitamin pills, homeopathic alternatives, and fake surgery. The study found that in certain cases the sham worked. Not only did it relieve the blues and aches in patients but when placebos were prescribed with real medicine, the latter showed a spike in effectiveness. Interestingly, the degree to which a placebo was successful depended on its looks and price. The cheaper they came, the less effective they were. Patients also liked pills to come in certain sizes and colors, injections proved to be the best.

Although nobody knows why placebos work, it could have something to do with trust. Whenever a patient felt that the doctor listened and understood their concerns, the phony pharmacy excelled. However, BÄK made it clear that standard medication should never be denied if a person’s health might suffer. The Association also recommended that doctors should be educated about placebos and that international guidelines should be drawn up to regulate their usage.^[6]

4 Bothering GPs – Bollywood Dancing

General practitioners have an unusual burden. Patients are making appointments for things physicians cannot help with, like loneliness, debt, welfare and housing issues. In London, almost every third appointment is non-medical. As a result, GPs are swamped. Their long working hours lead to burn-out and practices struggle to hire new doctors because of the workload.

In London, Parchmore medical center tried something called “community prescribing.” The project launched in the borough of Croyden and allowed doctors to prescribe things that got people out of their homes and more involved with their community. However, each person was allocated an activity related to their problem. Loneliness might get a ticket for bingo or Bollywood dancing lessons. Welfare issues saw prescriptions for debt and housing meetings held at church halls.

There were 112 activities available and during the 18-month trial run, around 30,000 social sessions were handed out to patients. The results were promising. People became more social and connected with their community. GPs started working normal hours and outpatient referrals to Parchmore dropped by 20 percent in 2018.^[7]

3 Homelessness – A House

Hawaii receives an annual Medicaid allotment of $2 billion. A fraction of the population is responsible for the greatest drain on this resource. Homeless people keep arriving at the emergency room with injuries, infections, mental illness and the fallout of substance abuse. Their treatment is covered by Medicaid but expenses skyrocket because individuals often return within a week with renewed infections or complications. This boomerang habit is due to living in unsanitary conditions or not having adequate shelter.

On average, one person could cost Medicaid $120,000 per year. Put that next to the $18,000 required to give someone a home and the answer seems obvious. In 2017, a radical bill was proposed. If homelessness could be classified as a medical condition, then doctors would be able to prescribe a house. Indeed, past research showed that healthcare costs fell by 43 percent in when the homeless were given housing. Despite the savings and safety for the homeless, not everyone agrees with the bill. The department of human resources development fears it might be abused to get free houses, plus that the costs could overwhelm the healthcare system anyway.^[8]

2 Burn Wounds – Virtual Reality

Shriners Hospital for Children is one of the best burn facilities in America. They treat kids that arrive with terrible burn wounds, sometimes covering their faces or as much as 70 percent of their bodies. Despite Shriners’ excellent care, the strongest painkillers are not always enough. In the words of Hunter Hoffman, the pain experienced by the kids is “astronomically high.”

Hoffman is both a cognitive psychologist and the director of the Washington-based Virtual Reality Research Center. Hoffman and his colleagues came up with a novel idea. The human attention span is only so long and pain requires a lot of focus. Theoretically, should a person get lost in a virtual world, their pain awareness should drop as more brain signals are occupied with the false reality.

Remarkably, it worked. The children’s wounds prevented a fitted device, so Hoffman used a robotic arm to hold goggles near the patient’s face. The game is called “SnowCanyon” and features cute Arctic characters the player can pelt with snowballs. The children were so distracted by the igloos and floating along the canyon that nurses could clean their wounds during the game. Indeed, their pain levels dropped by 50 percent.^[9]

1 Addiction – Heroin

In 2016, Canada’s government passed an unusual law. Heroin addicts can now get their fix legally. There are serious rules restricting access to diacetylmorphine, which is medical-grade heroin. First, a patient must have failed at every other conventional treatment. A doctor must then apply to the health department on behalf of the addict. Everyone is judged on a case-by-case basis and should the person receive approval, the department provides the diacetylmorphine.

The approach has two benefits. The drug methadone is normally used to wean patients off heroin. When compared, the statistics showed that more people kicked the habit when they used diacetylmorphine than methadone. Those on methadone were also more likely to turn to other drugs. Secondly, the addict is monitored by medical staff during the heroin injection. This provides a safe and controlled space that otherwise could end with an overdose. In fact, Canada’s rising overdose death rate was one of the reasons why the new treatment was embraced. The paradoxical approach is not unique to the country. Doctors can prescribe diacetylmorphine in Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland.^[10]

Physicians don’t just use awful handwriting to stop us from knowing whatever they write. They also use slang to stop us from understanding whatever they are saying.

See Also: Top 10 Codes You Aren’t Meant To Know

Medical terms are sometimes humorous and used to explain some hilarious medical scenario. Others are used to hide more offensive or derogatory statements. And then there is the distinct category of slang used to describe the condition of dying patients, hide controversial medical procedures from their relatives or just refer to the annoying habits of loved ones.

10 John Thomas Sign

The John Thomas, JT or Throckmorton‘s sign is a slang used by physicians to refer to the position of the penis in the X-ray scans of a man’s pelvis. A patient has a positive John Thomas sign if his penis points in the direction of the injured body part and a negative John Thomas sign if it points in the opposite direction.

Some physicians believe the position of the penis in x-ray scans is not always coincidental. For instance, men with hip fractures are likelier to have positive John Thomas signs. Physicians believe this is because patients with hip injuries often rest at an angle to avoid pain and discomfort, causing the penis to point towards the injured hip. Logical . . . but weird.^[1]

9 Slow Code

Physicians sometimes believe a patient cannot be saved, irrespective of what medical procedure is performed on them. At other times, they could even have concerns that resuscitation attempts could cause more harm than good (in the case of survival with horrific related injuries).

However, they do not just abandon the patient to their fate since it could lead to lawsuits, imprisonment, loss of license or worse. So they perform what they call the slow code.

A slow code is a deliberately weak attempt at resuscitating a dying patient. Physicians on a slow code will not perform all the life-saving procedures they should. When they do, they perform it sluggishly, hoping the patient will be dead before they are done.

The slow code is often the fallout of the difficulties in explaining the condition of the patient to their relatives. So the physicians perform the ruse to trick the relatives of the patient into thinking they are really trying to save the dying.

The slow code is a very controversial process, even among nurses and physicians. While some suggest it should only be used as an option of last resort, others insist it is never an option.^[2]

8 Medical Zebra

Doctors in training are often told “When you hear the sound of hooves, think horses, not zebras.” The saying uses horses to refer to common diseases and zebras to refer to rarer diseases. The idea is that almost every human is likelier to see a horse than a zebra, except maybe if you live somewhere in the African savanna or near some wildlife park.

Rare and common diseases often have similar symptoms and a doctor could easily misdiagnose the symptoms of a common ailment as rare. So the saying encourages doctors to assume the symptoms are caused by the common disease and not the rarer disease.

While the slang has probably saved millions from misdiagnoses, it has caused trouble for medical zebras, the slang for patients with rare diseases. Physicians often have a hard time diagnosing people with rare diseases. Medical zebras often visit several physicians and undergo many series of tests before the real cause of their symptoms is discovered.^[3]

7 Frequent Fliers

A frequent flier is a patient who frequently reports to a hospital emergency room for non-emergency reasons. They often arrive the emergency room in ambulances or just walk straight-in without any help. Frequent fliers visit the emergency room so often hospital staff know them by their names.

Little wonder they are also called high-utilizer, super utilizer or GOMER (Get out of my Emergency Room), which we will mention in the next entry.

Some patients become frequent fliers because they do not have insurance and cannot afford a regular doctor visit. So they just go straight to the emergency room where they will always receive treatment. Some have insurance but just prefer to visit the emergency room for unclear reasons.

However, the action of the frequent flier is often costly. One study revealed frequent fliers formed 1% of the patients that visited hospitals in Camden, New Jersey. Yet their visits were 30% of the running costs of these hospitals. Another 2009 study revealed nine patients visited the emergency room of a Texan hospital 2,678 times. Their visits cost the hospital $3 million.^[4]

6 Get Out Of My Emergency Room

In 1978, Dr. Steve Bergman released his novel “The House of God,” which he wrote under the pseudonym, Samuel Shem. The book is about a medical intern in his first year of internship and is based on his real-life experience at the time he was an intern at Beth Israel Hospital, Boston, between 1973 and 1974.

In the book, Dr. Bergman revealed some slang used by doctors. One is GOMER, which means Get out of my Emergency Room.

GOMER is a often used for an elderly patient at the brink of death. They are barely alive, cannot perform basic human functions and cannot be saved by medical care. However, they do not die and often go in and out of emergency rooms.

Dr. Bergman also revealed other medical slang like turfing, which refers to the act of referring or transferring a patient to another service. This new service could be another hospital, a nursing home, the patient’s home or even a morgue. A physician who refuses to admit a patient or turfs them to another service even before they are admitted is called a wall.

There is also the sieve, who is a doctor that only accepts a few patients even though they could admit more. These sort of doctors are often considered a problem. A bounce or bounceback is used to refer to a patient that is readmitted. Another is LOL in NAD, which means Little Old Lady in No Apparent Distress.^[5]

5 July Effect

It is said that some doctors advise that people should not allow their friends and families undergo surgeries in teaching hospitals in July. This is because of what physicians call the July effect.

Every July, fresh graduates from medical schools resume work as interns in teaching hospitals. Their inexperience means they often make errors. Lots of errors, which causes an abnormal increase in patient deaths.

Researchers from the University of California proved that the July effect is real after analyzing over 62 million death certificates issued in the US between 1979 and 2006. They discovered that teaching hospitals often saw a 10% increase in deaths in July.^[6]

4 Normal For Norfolk

Normal for Norfolk (or N4N) is a slang for a weird person. It started off as a medical phrase for a patient who cannot correctly describe the symptoms of their ailment or is just odd in some other way. It was also used to refer to a patient from a rural area.

We know the slang is named after Norfolk county in Britain even though its origin is uncertain. One source says doctors at Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital created the phrase to refer to mentally retarded patients. Another source indicates the phrase was created by doctors outside Norfolk over concerns that people there have weird characteristics.

Weird news reports from Norfolk probably reinforced this stereotype. Once upon a time, news agencies reported that police in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, detained a driver carrying a wardrobe on top of his car. The wardrobe was only secured on the car with a bubble wrap. Other news reported that Norfolk farmers were hiring humans as scarecrows. Perhaps one of our British readers can shed some light on this in the comments.^[7]

3 The Daughter From California

The Daughter from California (or Son from California in the case of men) is a medical term for a person who suddenly arrives at a hospital and demands physicians perform some medical procedures to save the life of a dying relative. Some Physicians sometimes swap California with New York.

The Daughter from California is usually angry and pisses the medical staff off. They refuse treatment suggestions, even from fellow relatives, and will continue to force their suggestions on everyone. Physicians consider their actions a syndrome they call Daughter from California syndrome.

The Daughter from California is often a distant relative that has not seen the dying relative in a while. So they are often surprised with how bad the situation has deteriorated. Physicians believe the guilt feelings of being away from the sick relative is often responsible for the behavior of the Daughter from California.^[8]

2 Funny-Looking Kid

The funny-looking kid (FLK) is used to refer to a child with some unknown growth or mental condition. The funny-looking kid often has a strange face. This could be evident in their flat nose bridges, sloppy foreheads, abnormal looking lips among others. Sometimes, their faces are normal but blank and without expression.

To be clear, doctors do not use funny to mean funny in the amusing sense. They use funny to mean odd. Nevertheless, the slang is considered derogatory.

The term is only used for children with abnormal faces caused by unidentified medical conditions. It is not used for children with more common medical conditions like Down Syndrome. The parent could also be called a funny-looking parent (FLP) if they have a similar looking face.^[9]

1 Social Injury Of The Rectum

Sometimes people stick weird things up their anus. And some of these items get so deep they reach the rectum and become irremovable, prompting a visit to the emergency room. Physicians call these sort of incidents “social injury of the rectum.”

Patients with social injury of the rectum often require surgery to remove whatever got stuck up there. Physicians have operated on patients with pens, beer bottles, bowling pins (WTF?!), baseballs, electrical tapes, wine corks, flashlights, cucumbers, fruits and light bulbs stuck in their rectums.

Physicians have also removed larger items like wooden rods, ice picks, a soy sauce bottle, a peanut butter jar, the head of a Barbie doll and a bed post from the rectum of patients.

For understandable reasons, most patients only complain of abdominal pain and refuse to reveal the real issue whenever they get admitted. They only partly confess after x-rays reveal they have got some other weird stuffs up there. We say partly because they sometimes deny putting anything in their anus and provide hilarious suggestions to explain how those items ended up there.

One elderly man said he was using an ice pick to push hemorrhoids into his anus when the ice pick went up his butt (I guess that’s one way to apply Preparation H). Another said he was using a flashlight to force himself to poop when it went in. Yet another unfortunate patient said he was sleepwalking and somehow ended with a light bulb in his rectum. And, finally, a fourth said he fell on a cucumber while showering.

Physicians say people do not always put weird things up their rectum for sexual reasons. Some shove items up their anuses because they enjoy the feeling of getting it removed by physicians (wait . . . isn’t that sexual?) Some also ended up with weird stuff in their rectum after eating it (let that be a warning to any budding sword swallowers reading this!)^[10]

The human body is a mystery. And as far as science and medicine have come—and it is incredibly far—the chemical machines that we are are simply too complicated to master in every infinitesimal, intricate way. Physicians still encounter mysteries daily, and some of them have been seriously strange.

Patients have made impossible recoveries throughout history when all seemed lost or faded away for seemingly no reason. People have grown, secreted, emitted, and even become things you would never imagine, even when life and death were off the table. 

With that in mind, this list will bring together medical phenomena that may be wonderful, terrible, or just bizarre, but all of which doctor’s still can’t explain.

Related: 10 Potentially Deadly Accidents That Cured People Of Medical Ailments

10 Decapitated and Survived

As farfetched as it may sound to us, there are actually a few recorded instances in which a person has been decapitated and survived. The reason: the injury is what’s known as an internal decapitation (or orthopedic decapitation, or atlanto-occipital dislocation), in which the skull and spine separate, but the skin and other tissue around the bones remain sealed. This injury results in a head that is only attached to the body via limp, soft tissue.

Here are the statistics: for those who suffer an internal decapitation, 70% die instantly, another 28% die within hours, and the remaining 2% lucky enough to survive have almost all become paralyzed for life. And yet somehow, in 2008, after nine-year-old Jordan Taylor was internally decapitated in a car crash, the young boy almost fully recovered within three months and walked out of the hospital doors on his own. 

As the boy’s mother, Stacey, puts it, “He’s like a little boy again…he is walking—I have to tell him to slow down. This is the best Christmas miracle that I could ever imagine.”

9 The Toxic Woman

One incident heavy on the mysterious side of miraculous but light on the fortunate side is the case of Gloria Ramirez, better known as “The Toxic Lady.” On February 19, 1994, Ramirez visited an emergency room as she was experiencing heart palpitations. Then Ramirez, the physicians in her room, and seemingly the very air around them evolved into something as deadly as it was baffling.

While the staff was treating Ramirez, they noticed her body behaving strangely. Her skin took an oily sheen, and she emitted two strange odors: one garlicky and one like ammonia. Staff began feeling nauseous and lightheaded. A nurse passed out—then a doctor. 

That night, Ramirez passed away, but not before her odd biochemistry caused 23 people to become ill, five of which required hospitalization. What made the Lady so Toxic is still unknown—though may be related to her use of dimethyl sulfoxide.

8 Phineas Gage

Phineas Gage is a legend. Not because he didn’t exist, as he lived a very real life, but because one accident in his life has become, according to some psychologists, “one of the great medical curiosities of all time.” At age 25, Gage’s head was pierced all the way through by a large iron rod, causing the abrupt removal of much of his frontal lobe and, from that day forward, a complete shift in Gage’s personality.

The rod, a tamping iron, rocketed through and out of Gage’s head due to Gage’s distraction while working as a blasting foreman. From that point forward, every detail of Gage’s life is interesting. Though Gage’s physician and employers agreed that his “memory and general intelligence seemed unimpaired after the accident,” both also agreed that his personality changed for the worse. 

His physician writes that Gage was “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not pre­vi­ous­ly his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertina­cious­ly obstinate, yet capricious and vac­il­lat­ing.” Gage continued to make uncharacteristic choices for years, until his last few years, when his behavioral changes seemed to begin reversing on their own.

7 The Dancing Plague

In 1518, a few hundred otherwise normal people in Strasbourg, Alsace (modern-day France) found themselves with an insatiable compulsion to dance. They danced for months on end, even enough to cause death, the incident coming to be known as the Dancing Plague of 1518. The reason behind any of the dancing is still unknown.

The incident began with just one woman who danced in the street and soon spread to hundreds of others. Accounts of the case, like most from that time period, are unreliable and superstitious, leaving the number of victims and number of dead (if any) vague. Nonetheless, it is clear that the event took place in some form and that it has no simple medical explanation to this day.

6 Gluten Delusions

There once was a woman in Massachusetts (whose name is left anonymous) who, at age 37, had a good, normal life. At the time, she was well-liked and working on her Ph.D. Then, seemingly out of the blue, she began experiencing severe hallucinations and paranoia. Anti-psychotic drugs didn’t help. Nothing did. One of her many doctor’s visits revealed that she had celiac disease, but by then, her delusions had turned her doctors into sinister, conspiring enemies, and she paid them no mind.

Eventually, when she hit rock bottom, having lost her job and friends and abandoned her studies, she sought out doctors again. They insisted she begin a gluten-free diet. Within weeks, her symptoms were almost entirely absent. What’s more, when at one point during recovery, the woman accidentally ate gluten, her symptoms returned immediately, and she even attempted to murder her parents. And once again, when she returned to a gluten-free diet, her symptoms vanished—this time in prison.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the mechanism underlying her story is still being studied and is unlikely to gain a concrete answer soon.

5 Foreign Accent Syndrome

Many different incidents can cause foreign accent syndrome, but most commonly, the cause is a stroke. After the stroke, sufferers begin speaking in an accent different from their own. Frequently, it is from a place they’ve never even been to or encountered at all.

The level to which their speech changes varies, as does the apparent cause. The accent gained can also come from seemingly any region, not even one that primarily speaks the patient’s language. But one commonality to every case is its mysterious neurological mechanisms and the level to which, whether explainable or not, the acquired accents seem impossible.

4 Dead for Forty-Five Minutes

After her incident, Ruby Graupera-Cassimiro told ABC News, “I was dead. My husband tells me, ‘You were gray. You were cold as ice, and you were dead. You had no color in your lips.’” Indeed she was dead—for 45 minutes. Then, seemingly of her own volition, she decided to live again.

Graupera-Cassimiro returned to life after 45 minutes of legal death, which is a miracle in and of itself. But on top of that, she somehow avoided any brain damage and even any burns from the five times doctors tried to jumpstart her heart again. 

During her time under, Graupera-Cassimiro describes a religious experience with a spiritual being, and her impossible recovery makes us not want to question it.

3 The 36-Year-Old Fetus

Imagine at 36 you discover that you were born with a twin you never knew about. Then imagine that you find out your twin is still alive, and even better, is nearby. You might feel like you had been blessed with a miracle. Until that is, you find out exactly how near your twin had been. So near, in fact, that for 36 years, it had been living and growing next to your stomach—surviving by drinking your blood.

That is the story of Sanju Bhagat, who at age 36 went to have a lump in his torso removed, fearing it was a tumor. The lump was somehow both better and worse than a tumor. As one of Bhagat’s doctors recalls, “(the surgeon) just put his hand inside and he said ‘there are a lot of bones inside.’ First, one limb came out, then another limb came out. Then some part of genitalia, then some part of hair, some limbs, jaws, limbs, hair.” 

The most spine-tingling quote of all goes to the surgeon himself, who said, “To my surprise and horror, I could shake hands with somebody inside [Baghat’s body]. It was a bit shocking for me.” The condition, which we know as fetus in fetu, is incredibly rare, and usually, both individuals die before or during birth. In this case, both survived for 36 years. The fetus’s nails were even growing long.

2 Pathological Generosity

The stories of Phineas Gage and the women with celiac delusions demonstrated how major biological changes can cause equally major psychological changes. However, in both cases, the changes were dark and off-putting. Luckily, the story of the Brazilian man known only as João exists to demonstrate the opposite: after suffering a stroke, João became neurologically addicted to charity.

After his attack, João quit his job as a human resources manager and opened a street cart that sold French fries. Well, perhaps sold isn’t the right word, as João gave fries away for free constantly. When he did accept payment for them, he quickly gave it to local beggars and children. He was so generous that he forced his family into relative poverty. 

His neurologist concluded that João was “pathologically generous—compulsively driven to give.” This neurological shift helped some and hurt others, but in either case, remains largely unexplained.

1 Ask and Ye Shall Receive

This particular medical material earns its spot at #1 simply for being a classic and for being a breath of pure, fresh air after some strange twists and turns. At age 56, Greg Thomas was diagnosed with inoperable cancer throughout his head and neck. Doctors instructed him and his family to begin funeral preparations. 

In his supposedly final days, Thomas began stopping by a local church. However, he prayed at its door daily, noticing that it was always locked and becoming increasingly dilapidated. Asking around, Thomas found the owners and requested that he be able to spend what time he had left restoring the church. All he wanted in exchange was the ability to pray inside it.

As he renovated the church and prayed, his condition changed. Thomas remembers that “My oncologist was blown away. She said, ‘Whatever you’re doing, keep on doing it.’” Four years after his diagnosis, the church looked a century younger than it had, and Thomas’s cancer was in full remission. As Thomas puts it, “While I was restoring the church, God was restoring me.”

Dogs have an incredible sense of smell. In fact, canines are equipped with over 100 million sensory receptors within their nasal cavity, whereas humans possess about six million. Additionally, dogs also have a second olfactory system that not only allows them to pick up on physical smells but also allows them to detect pheromones, human emotions, and even the presence of storms.

Given their powerful noses, it’s no wonder dogs have been used in hunting, trained to sniff out bombs or drugs, and assisted in search and rescue missions.

However, the 10 dogs on this list were able to accurately detect a much more important, typically undetectable odor in their owners—cancer. And they did so long before their human companions were ever diagnosed by a healthcare professional.

Related: Top 10 Dogs With Unusual Jobs

10 Sierra the Siberian Husky

When Stephanie Herfel’s son left for the Air Force in 2011, she took in his nine-month-old Siberian husky puppy, Sierra. Little did Herfel know what a gift Sierra would truly be.

One day in 2013, Sierra began sniffing and pressing her nose into Herfel’s abdomen. At first, Herfel assumed that perhaps the dog smelled food that she had spilled on her shirt. However, the substance Sierra detected was startling enough to make her roll up into a ball and hide in the closet.

While Herfel had previously experienced pain in her abdomen, she was advised by an ER physician that she had an ovarian cyst and was sent home with pain medication. Given Sierra’s reaction, Herfel made an appointment with her gynecologist. On November 11, 2013, her doctor confirmed that she had stage 3 ovarian cancer.

Herfel had a full hysterectomy, lost her spleen, and continued chemotherapy until April 2014. Unfortunately, in 2015, Sierra again exhibited the same behavior as in 2013 when she “smelled” Herfel’s cancer. Sierra was right again—the cancer had returned—but this time in Herfel’s liver. Sierra also confirmed a third recurrence of cancer in 2016.

Sadly, Herfel passed away on July 8, 2021, at 54, after an eight-year battle with ovarian cancer and acute myeloid leukemia. However, had it not been for Sierra’s keen sense of smell, Herfel may not have had the additional eight years with her family.^[1]

9 Heidi the German Shepherd-Lab Mix

Anne Wills’s dog Heidi, a German shepherd-lab mix, worked as a search and rescue dog. While Heidi had saved thousands of lives, Wills could never have imagined that Heidi would also save her life.

In February 2015, Heidi began exhibiting strange behaviors each time Wills would sit down—refusing to let Wills up, scratching her arm, and panting excessively, almost as if in a panic. From there, Heidi began pressing her nose into Wills’s chest, taking deep breaths.

Assuming something was wrong with her canine companion, Wills took Heidi to the vet. However, after Heidi received a clean bill of health, Wills realized that Heidi might, in fact, be sensing something was wrong with her instead.

Wills made an appointment to see her doctor, and after being sent for a CAT scan, she was informed that she had lung cancer. She underwent surgery along with intensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments with Heidi by her side every step of the way. Sadly, Heidi passed away from cancer on December 24, 2015.^[2]

8 Victoria the Treeing Walker Coonhound

Lauren Gauthier of Buffalo, New York, is the founder of Magic’s Mission Beagle and Hound Rescue, an animal rescue organization that saves dogs from abusive and neglectful situations.

In 2017, Gauthier took in Victoria, a treeing walker coonhound with an infected eye, who had been surrendered by a hunter. Gauthier never realized that not only was she saving Victoria but that Victoria would also save her.

In the spring of 2017, Victoria began staring at Gauthier’s face and putting her nose directly on an area that Gauthier had assumed was simply a pimple or blemish. Victoria would repeatedly touch Gauthier’s nose, look at her, and then smell the area again. When Victoria’s behavior persisted, Gauthier decided to see a doctor.

Gauthier had a biopsy, revealing that the “dot” on her face was actually a basal cell carcinoma. However, thanks to Victoria’s heightened senses and persistence with her owner, Gauthier was able to catch the skin cancer in the early stages and undergo surgery to have it removed.^[3]

7 Troy the Doberman Pinscher

Diane Papazian and her husband Harry already owned a fox terrier. However, in 2011, Harry insisted they add Troy, a four-month-old Doberman pinscher, to their family. Given Papazian’s allergies, she was a bit hesitant, but she and her husband ended up bringing Troy into the family… a month earlier than expected. What Papazian did not yet understand was that Troy was meant to come into her life at the time he did.

As the tiny pup was lying in bed with the couple, Troy continued to nuzzle against Papazian’s left side, which caused an allergic reaction to her skin. As Papazian began scratching, she noticed a lump in her left breast.

Papazian had undergone a routine mammogram six months prior, and the results were normal, but after feeling the mass, she got in touch with her doctor. That lump turned out to be stage 2 breast cancer. Papazian had a double mastectomy, started chemotherapy treatments, and was later deemed cancer free, all thanks to their new pup.^[4]

6 Daisy-May the West Highland Terrier

In April 2017, 68-year-old Thelly Price’s west highland terrier, Daisy-May, began constantly sniffing around Price’s neck and throat. At first, Price couldn’t see or feel anything that would contribute to Daisy-May’s strange behavior. However, Daisy-May’s nose was spot on.

On May 17, 2017, Price went to the doctor after noticing a lump in the exact area that Daisy-May had been sniffing. Her doctor assumed she had a fatty lump, but after being referred to an ear, nose, and throat clinic for further evaluation, Price was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Thankfully, due to Daisy-May’s keen sense of smell and early detection, Price was able to undergo surgery without the need for radiation or chemotherapy.^[5]

5 Kransky the Miniature Dachsund

As Claire Seeber was curled up on the couch talking to her mother shortly after the Christmas of 2019, her “mini-sausage dog,” Kransky, began incessantly sniffing a mole on her right calf. While Seeber laughed at the tickling sensation, what Kransky discovered was no laughing matter.

Seeber explained her laughter to her mother and what was going on during their call. Given Kransky’s behavior, her mother urged her to get checked out. However, Seeber brushed off Kransky’s actions and her mother’s advice as simple paranoia. Nevertheless, Seeber’s mother wouldn’t back down, so she finally gave in and made an appointment.

As soon as her doctor took one look at the mole, he insisted that it needed to be removed and sent for biopsy. A few days later, Seeber’s doctor confirmed that she had a cancerous melanoma.

Seeber was scheduled for surgery to remove the surrounding cells and ensure that all of the cancer was gone. Thankfully, the surgery was a success which meant Seeber would not need any radiation or chemotherapy treatments, and best of all, Kransky was by her side the entire time.^[6]

4 Lola the Chihuahua

Approximately 10 days before Christmas 2020, 41-year-old Tess Robison’s chihuahua, Lola, began acting incredibly strange—smelling Tess’s breath, staring at her, and acting more needy than usual. Then, in a desperate attempt to get Robison’s attention, Lola jumped on her stomach. Two days later, a lump appeared.

Robison immediately made an appointment with her doctor, but it was uncertain what the mass was. Robison was then referred to several different hospitals before being diagnosed with stage 3 low-grade serous carcinoma, a rare form of ovarian cancer, in January 2021.

In March 2021, Robison underwent a 12-hour surgery in which a full hysterectomy was done. However, during the operation, doctors also discovered that cancer had spread to Robison’s bowels. Between the surgery and regular chemotherapy treatments, Robinson is now on the road to recovery.^[7]

3 Broady the Newfoundland

Forty-five-year-old Lucy Gies of Didcot, Oxfordshire, adopted Broady, a 154-pound (11-stone) Newfoundland in July of 2021 when his previous family was no longer able to care for him. Unbeknownst to Giles, the “gentle giant” would be more of a blessing than she would ever realize.

By September 2021, Broady began acting strange, and each time Giles would sit down, he would sniff and nuzzle her right armpit. Initially, Giles assumed Broady simply wanted extra attention. However, one morning as Giles was taking a shower, she decided to do a breast exam. That’s when she felt a lump in her right armpit.

Giles’s doctor believed that the lump was hormone related, but when weeks passed with no change, Giles was sent to the hospital for testing. Giles was diagnosed with HER-2 positive breast cancer and was told she also had cancer cells in her lymph nodes.

In October 2021, Giles began six rounds of chemotherapy, then had a lumpectomy followed by radiation treatment. Giles is currently still going through chemotherapy.^[8]

2 Bessie the Cairn Terrier

Ron Wain and his partner of Newhall, Yorkshire, rescued their Cairn terrier, Bessie, when she was only 10 months old. However, in 2018, after spending 12 years with the couple, Bessie exhibited behavior that was out of character, such as constantly watching Wain’s every move, following him around, and laying on his chest.

Around the same time Bessie began behaving strangely, Wain noticed he was having to make more trips to the restroom than normal. In light of Bessie’s odd behavior and his increased restroom visits, Wain decided to bring the issue to his doctor’s attention. Wain was then diagnosed with bladder cancer.

Unfortunately, Wain’s first operation was unsuccessful in removing all the cancer, so he opted for a bacterial treatment, which uses a strain of tuberculosis called bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) to treat non-invasive bladder cancers. Once Wain was at the end of his treatment, he was told his cancer had cleared. Bessie, too, stopped following Wain around and went back to her normal behavior.^[9]

1 Buster the Jack Russell Terrier

In the spring of 2014, Mike Wagner of Deering, New Hampshire, was lying in bed without a shirt when his dog Buster, a Jack Russell terrier, laid his head on Wagner’s chest and began nudging him. It was then that Wagner noticed a lump on his chest.

Wagner didn’t think too much of the lump and continued his work as a logger for the next few months. However, he began to notice that while he was working and pulling wood, every time he moved his arm, he got an odd feeling in his chest.

Wagner then made an appointment to get checked out. He was referred to a breast cancer center where a biopsy was done, and he was diagnosed with breast cancer. Wagner underwent surgery to remove the cancer, but during the procedure, the doctor realized it had also spread into Wagner’s lymph nodes.

In an attempt to rid his body of cancer, Wagner then went through five months of chemotherapy and six months of radiation. He officially had his last treatment on October 2, 2015.^[10]

The word doctor actually comes from the Latin word for “teacher.” These were meant to be people of knowledge and expertise. People who knew things the rest of us didn’t. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? In a general sense, that still holds true. But if you pay attention to the news, you know that not every doctor is all that smart and some are doing some extremely questionable things.

10. The Liver Scribe

Simon Bramhall was a British surgeon who was tasked with saving people’s lives. He performed two separate liver transplants in the summer of 2013 and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say he saved the lives of the patients he worked on. The problem was that wasn’t all he did.

While he was in there,he used a tool called an argon beam coagulator. It’s a tool that shoots ionized argon gas at a cut, allowing the wound to coagulate the blood without contact, effectively stopping it from bleeding. The electrical current that ionizes the gas can also destroy tissue, which is how it’s used in some cancer treatments. And, if you’re a guy like Dr. Bramhall, it can be used to burn your initials in someone’s liver.

Bramhall signed his initials on two separate livers and no one would have been any the wiser if not for one patient rejecting the transplant. When doctors went back in, they found the branded organ.

Bramhall was found guilty of assault, paid a fine, and lost his license to practice medicine. He then took up writing novels and has one called “The Letterman” which is about what he did. The description of the book includes the line “who wins when everyone loses?”

9. The Marrow Cure

If you ever want to discredit someone who still believes vaccines cause autism, direct them to Dr. Hugh Fudenberg, an immunologist and arguable madman who apparently knew less about science than a schnauzer.

Fudenberg believed he could cure autism and any doctor would probably want to believe that’s true. However, Fudenberg’s cure was giving children his own bone marrow. He was a collaborator with Andrew Wakefield on that study that has been cited for years now by anti vaxxers as a reason to not vaccinate their kids despite how often it’s been debunked as fraud. He also believed flu vaccines were causing Alzheimer’s and his crackpot research that has been thoroughly debunked ended up being cited by Bill Maher on Larry King Live.  He also lost his license to practice after the state board determined he was illegally obtaining medication for his own personal use.

8. The Daddy Doctors

Those who meet qualifications to donate sperm can make between $70 and $100 per donation, depending on where they go. Some donors can end up fathering hundreds of children. But this all typically follows a process of a man qualifying and following set procedures to ensure he is healthy and fits the profile needed. If a doctor wanted to sidestep those rules, do you think he could? The answer is yes. And it’s happened more than once.

A Dutch doctor was determined to have fathered 49 children in secret, swapping his own genetic material with that of donors. Families became suspicious when their children exhibited characteristics not in line with those of the donor, such as brown eyes when the donor and mother had blue eyes. Plus, some of them just looked like the doctor.

A doctor in Canada did the same thing, impregnating at least 17 women before he was caught. Some of the sperm used was his own, but some was just a mystery. Seventeen were identified as his, but 83 more children had unidentified fathers. That resulted in him not only losing his medical license, but a $13.3 million class action suit.

7. The Sterility Doctor

Javaid Perwaiz was an OB/GYN in Washington when he was running a health insurance scam to line his own pockets. He would perform unnecessary surgeries and bill insurance companies for them. Effectively, he was robbing the companies but also destroying the lives of his patients as well, none of whom needed the irreversible procedures he performed. Because of his speciality, he performed things like hysterectomies and sterilizations.

He bilked the government and insurance companies of more than $20 million. Law enforcement seized his assets, which included a Bentley and two homes.

He committed 52 counts of health care fraud, which ended up giving him 59 years in prison. But the human toll was far greater, considering that he needlessly robbed numerous women of their ability to have children. It’s not clear if he ever faced any specific punishment for what amounted to serious physical assaults against his victims.

6. The Organ Thieves

Word is a human heart can make you a millionaire on the black market. A liver is worth a little over half that much. A kidney is about a quarter. So if you have the skill to remove, handle, store, transport, and sell those organs, you could have a good side hustle as a serial killer. Lucky for the rest of us that most people can’t or won’t do that. But most people isn’t everyone.

Pathologists in Israel were harvesting organs from dead Palestinians without consent, a charge they admitted to after a Swedish paper accused the government of killing the Palestinians specifically for that purpose.

According to the government,they did harvest things like skin, corneas, hearts and bones not just from Palestinians but Israelis and foreigners, all of which was done without consent. But, they also claimed, it was over a decade prior to the report coming out and they hadn’t done it since.

5. The Baby Seller

The cost of going to the hospital in America is astronomical. Giving birth costs somewhere between $5000 and $11000 depending on your state. A C-section costs more. And if you need a room for overnight, you can expect the cost to double. So it’s not hard to imagine the cost of having a baby can be pretty stressful if you don’t have insurance or some other means to cover it.

If you wonder what happens when someone can’t afford it and they live in a country that’s less forgiving of debts, wonder no more. In 2021 reports emerged of a couple in Tulamba, Pakistan who couldn’t afford the private hospital bill for the delivery of their child. The doctor suggested a method of settling the debt – they could sell the baby. The couple refused, so the doctor took the child and sold it, anyway.

Police later arrested the doctor and, weirdly, there was no word on the baby.

4. The Hells Angels Hit

If you ever find yourself on trial for doling out fraudulent opioid prescriptions, make sure you think twice about ordering a hit on the witness against you. It’s just going to make things worse.

Anatoly Braylovsky had already been warned about giving out shady prescriptions, but he kept doing it, selling them for money. So when he was finally charged with it formally, he decided that he could maybe hire a hitman from the Hells Angels biker gang to make the problem go away. He broached the subject with a guy who turned out to be an FBI informant. An agent then went undercover as the hitman to make sure the doctor was very sure about what he wanted. He told the supposed hitman that he’d spend five days in prison before his trial and it was the worst thing he’d ever experienced. He needed to make sure he was never going back, which meant getting rid of the witness against him.

Getting caught in his murder for hire scheme has added a charge of obstruction of justice to the medical fraud that he was already charged with.

3. Dr. Nudes

It’s been a joke on the internet for a long time now that people will send you unsolicited nude pics with far too great a frequency. And by people we mean guys. And by nude, we mean a rather specific part of their anatomy. As many as 80% of men and 50% of women have received unsolicited nude pics. And while this is an offensive pitfall of life on the internet, you certainly don’t expect to experience this in real life. And certainly not at a doctor’s office. And yet that’s what happened to patients of Canadian Dr. Nigel Phipps.

Phipps was a family doctor and, according to accusations, he showed cell phone pictures of himself naked and semi-naked to 11 patients and three staff members. The medical board ended up suspending Phipps for 14 months, but didn’t take his license. Instead, he’s forbidden from treating patients without another healthcare professional present and he needs to see a psychiatrist as well as pay for therapy for those he victimized.

In what seems to be a weird twist, the doctor-rating site RateMDs has him listed as a 4.5 out of 5 star doctor. These include reviews from after his suspension.

2. The Biggest Liar Ever

No one likes a braggart or a know it all, which means very few people must have liked Paolo Macchiarini, a doctor once described as a trailblazer in the world of stem cell research. His wikipedia page introduces him as a conman.

Macchiarini was instrumental in introducing a new kind of windpipe surgery that involved transplanting a new esophagus grown with stem cells into patients. He used a donor esophagus and seeded it with new cells. Six of the eight patients who received the surgery ended up dying. The doctor was accused of falsifying data and committing fraud.

Even in his private life, Macchiarini couldn’t keep things above board. He started an affair with a producer from the show Dateline and even got engaged to her despite the fact he had been married for 30 years already. He told people that the Pope himself was going to officiate the wedding and guests would include the Clintons, the Emperor of Japan, and then-President Obama.

1. Dr. Sextsalot

The internet is awash on statistics about teen sexting, just one more thing for paranoid parents to worry about. You know what far less people talk about? Doctor sexting. And which one worries you more? The ones where a couple of kids say inappropriate stuff to each other late at night or the one where the man responsible for maintaining your anesthesia during surgery is rattling off filth in the middle of your surgery?

Arthur Zilberstein got suspended when he was found to be repeatedly sending dirty text messages in the middle of procedures, including one surgery during which he sent 45 messages.

The nimble fingered doctor was rattling them off during appendectomies, epidurals and, of course, cesarean deliveries because what’s more conducive to sending dirty text messages than that? Some of his texts were inviting a woman, a former patient, to come to the hospital to have sex.

Zilberstein was also apparently snapping off pics of his nether regions in various hospital rooms, taking medical records to look at nude pictures of patients, and prescribing pills without making records of it.