Going to the doctor can be an ordeal even before your bunions are properly diagnosed as leprosy -- among those forces conspiring to test your patience are interminable waits, loud children, and shitty magazines. ("Oh, a single issue of Redbook. From 1996.")
Some medical professionals, however, seem to go out of their way to elevate the entire experience from "horrible" to "hellish" in a way you just can't learn in medical school. Here are five real MDs who make Gregory House look like Dr. Dolittle.
Some medical problems require creative solutions, and sometimes those solutions involve wrangling someone's junk in your pie-hole. When a woman in Sacramento told her surgeon that her sensitive gag reflex might complicate an upcoming upper-gastrointestinal endoscopy, Dr. J. Peter Zegarra told her that she "should be giving her husband a blow job at least twice a week to address her issue."
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He then presumably high-fived her husband while an orderly played the riff from Motley Crue's "Dr. Feelgood."
Is this a thing doctors do now? You slip them a 20, and they tell your wife they need to give you a BJ or they'll die? Needless to say, Zegarra ended up getting reprimanded by the California Medical Board. Moral of the story: Doctors, don't learn your bedside manner from Menage a Triage 5: The Boner Emergency.
Doctors have every right to be religious, but not to be complete douchenozzles about it. When a woman in Blenheim, New Zealand, went to see Dr. Joseph Lee to renew her birth control prescription, Dr. Lee said, "Nope," and told her she couldn't have the pill until she fulfilled her "reproductive job" by popping out at least four kids consecutively.
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"Singles only. None of this 'twins' bullshit."
Instead, he instructed the woman to use the rhythm method, which is basically playing Russian roulette with the days of the week. And this isn't a one-time thing: Dr. Lee has been saying the same thing to patients as young as 16, telling them that getting pregnant might be "their destiny." So, good news, teen moms -- you're basically Jedi Knights!
A man in St. Louis was seeing an orthopedic surgeon when the doctor suddenly went into a 10-minute diatribe about the dangers of smoking. We should mention at this point that the patient was a 68-year-old man, not some clueless teenager, and that he'd come to the doctor because of a hurt ankle. The kicker came a few days later when the man got a $95 bill for a "smoking consultation":
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"Spoilers For Last Week's Game Of Thrones -- $150"
The hospital where Dr. Jeffrey Johnson works said it's a common practice to bill for a consultation lasting for more than three minutes, even if the patient didn't ask for it. Please keep this in mind the next time your doctor just opens the Wikipedia page for "cancer" and begins reading it out loud.
Terry Ragland from Tennessee went to see her local doctor because she was suffering from lower back pain. Was it sciatica? Spinal stenosis? Osteoarthritis? Nope: Upon examining her X-rays, Dr. Timothy Sweo offered his diagnosis: "Ghetto booty." The doctor then explained to the stunned patient that there is no cure for ghetto booty.
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"I'm going to give you the number of a colleague who specializes in this sort of thing."
After deservedly getting in deep shit, Dr. Sweo clarified that he meant to say the woman had a curvature of the spine that caused her posterior to protrude, but tried to put that in terms she could understand, which is presumably why he also delivered the diagnosis by rapping and breakdancing on the floor.
Veteran neurosurgeon Dr. Wlodzimierz Szepielow was suspended from practicing medicine in 2007 when a patient died under his care. In an attempt to prove he still had it, Szepielow scored an unprecedented 17.5 percent on his medical knowledge test and broke the air pipe of a plastic dummy while trying to give it CPR. That's when the guy said "Welp, had a good run, time to retire," right? Nope: He demanded his license back by complaining that the test was "too stressful," because apparently being a brain surgeon is the chillest job ever.
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It's all champagne waterfalls and back-rubs once they close the door to the OR.
Szepielow is now threatening to sue the Fitness to Practice panel for how they described his skills -- we imagine their official report consisted of a GIF of a penguin repeatedly falling down -- while at the same time insisting they should hire him to assess other doctors. Are we sure this guy didn't operate on his own brain at some point?
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