While Googling your symptoms may seem like the most logical thing to do, sometimes WebMD is wrong. Oh, so, so wrong.
College Kids
Most incorrect was a middle-aged man who was brought in by EMS after a car accident. He was having some thigh pain and said he thought it was just a bruise. I lifted the sheet, took a look, put the sheet back down and said “sir, your femur is sticking through your skin”. Now, in fairness, EMS had already told me about the open femur fracture, but how the patient wasn’t aware is beyond me. Most entertaining self-diagnosis, however, involved the 18-year-old, brand new college freshman coming in Saturday around noon with “alcohol poisoning”. Her symptoms included nausea, headache, feeling like crap. Interestingly, symptoms only started this morning. I told her she had a hangover, and she asked me if I was sure, because this had to be something more serious. Source
Good Thing He Got It Checked
My dad had this pain in his back he swore up and down was some kind of muscle knot.. Turned out to be a tumor the size of my fist in his vertebra (multiple miloma). He knew something was wrong when his legs started going numb because it was pushing on his spinal column. That was 3 years ago. Surgery went well and he’s still cancer free.Source
She Was Just Sleeping
Veterinary assistant here. Woman came in with her dog and got some sedatives to help the dog relax. She comes back fifteen minutes later in a panic claiming her dog was having a heart attack because he was panting and sleepy. She gave her dog the prescribed sedative and freaked out when it worked as described. Source
Well That’s Could Have Been Bad
I had a patient who was a lab tech for a chemo facility. He came in one night freaking out that he had skin cancer because there was a new spot on his abdomen present for 2 days. I looked at the spot up close and realized it wasn’t skin at all, scraped at it a bit, and it rolled up and fell off leaving his nice lesion-less skin beneath. Guy felt ridiculous and left in a hurry. It was of the consistency of a fruit roll-up and dark green. The only thing I can think of it being was a booger that dried to his skin. Source
Ewww
IBS. Wrong. Mason jar stuck up his butt. Source
You’re A Guy
I had a patient who told me he got pain every now and then in his fallopian tubes, and that perhaps they had a blockage. Yes I said he. Source
Wow It Comes Off
I had a teenager and her mom come in worried she had some kind of serious circulation problem because her toes were blue. I looked at her feet and thought “that’s not really the right shade for loss of blood flow.” I grabbed an alcohol swab and proceeded to wipe the blue color off the tops of her toes. I think it was from her new jeans. Source
Just A Tomato
I’m a pathologist. I was sent a piece of red-brown tissue once that the patient had found in their underwear, she took it to her general practitioner who sent it to the lab as a possible miscarriage-it was a semi digested tomato. I had a similar case that was sent as a parasite or worm for identification-it was a long piece of carrot. Source
Ouch
Guy once came to clinic with what he called a friction burn on his penis. It was a syphilis chancre. He was incredulous. He had no idea how that could have happened. After a long stare down by me, he finally admitted to doing something he was not supposed to be doing. He never elaborated on that. Source
Not Mono
I once thought I had Mono for an entire year… turns out I was just really bored. Source
Interesting
I am not a doctor but a psychology student. During my practicum in a psychiatry we had a patient, who was very sure that he had severe depression, because all people in his life treated him very poorly and unfair. It was a bad case of narcissistic personality disorder. Source
You Won’t Get Ebola That Way
When the Ebola case happened in Dallas, we had a woman run into our clinic panicked and crying and demanding to be seen. She was sure she had Ebola because she had a fever and had “driven through Dallas with the windows down the day before.” Also dealt with a guy in training with delusions of parasitosis who brought in the “worms” he had dug out of his face on strips of tape. They were nerve endings. Source
The Man-Flu
We thought my husband had the man-flu… Was feeling unwell, went to the doctor who ordered blood tests. Turns out- not man-flu but cancer and had less than a month to live if he didn’t start treatment ASAP. Source
What Was She On?
EMT. Had an elderly woman call us because her son was in their living room, laying unconscious. We show up. She was hallucinating. A diagnosis so wrong it involved someone else (who was about an hour away). Source
Seriously?
Very concerned young-ish woman who’d been doing some WebMDing and was CONVINCED she had an abdominal aortic aneurysm, because she’d been feeling some movement in her abdomen she thought was a pulsatile mass. Actual diagnosis: pregnancy. The “pulsatile mass” she’d been feeling was just a fetus kicking around. Source