Worst advice given to you by a "professional"

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  • LorinaLynn
    LorinaLynn Posts: 13,248 Member
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    Not weight loss related, but when I had raging bad TMJD and couldn't open my mouth more than 9mm without intense pain and my jaw making all kinds of horrible cracking noises, a tmj specialist oral surgeon told me, "That's just the way god made you."

    Dude... I'm an atheist. In my mind, god didn't make me. And I wasn't "made" this way two years ago, so fix my damn jaw already!

    My regular dentist got me all straightened out. And now I can open my mouth like a frickin' Pez dispenser. :happy:
  • nicholettebell
    nicholettebell Posts: 414
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    Everything Dr.OZ has ever said.

    Perfect.
  • JayByrd107
    JayByrd107 Posts: 282 Member
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    That I needed to weigh 120 pounds, by a doctor. I was only 140 at the time (at 5'4, so not even overweight). I'm pretty sure my bare skeleton weighs 120.

    So, you think that the whole rest of you (organs, skin, blood, water, turd) weighs a whole 20 pounds? Yeah... that sounds reasonable... stupid doctor.
  • pudadough
    pudadough Posts: 1,271 Member
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    I had a doctor at the student health clinic at college tell me that the best way to treat my varicose veins was to get a deep tan.

    You'll get skin cancer, but it's better than blue veins, right?!? :noway:

    Same doctor also told me she ordered chest x-rays for me to make sure a recurring pain "wasn't cancer." Wanted to scare the hell out of me just to be safe, I guess. It turned out to be a nerve pinched by my scoliosis...

    There was a reason all the students called it "The Quack Shack."
  • ClareWantsProgress
    ClareWantsProgress Posts: 173 Member
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    A doctor gave me a serious complex when i was 17, weighed 135lbs at 5"4 and told me I was 15lbs over weight....Uhhh...that's a helathy BMI and back then I was mostly muscle...What the heck?!

    I once had a nurse weigh me and then say "whoa I didnt know you weighed that much. Don't worry , you don't look it. I guess it's bc you're tall."

    Backhanded compliment much? Btw at the time I only weight 143 at 5'9 :(

    I had something almost exactly like that happen to me. I weighed 150 at 5'7", and the PA said "Wow, I guess it's a good thing you don't look like you weigh that much."


    I've gotten that, too. Also, "Oh, I thought you weighed more than that. But you carry it well." And this from a severely overweight nurse.
  • jukramer
    jukramer Posts: 39 Member
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    My orthopedic surgeon told me I could do anything two months after a discectomy/laminectomy. "Anything?" I asked. "Can I start running?" "Anything," he said.
    5 months later I had to have surgery again, and now, after six months of PT and 3 months on my own, I finally am starting to do things I once did.
    But I'm still not running.
  • insatiable_need
    insatiable_need Posts: 127 Member
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    The doctor who was going to remove my gall bladder when I was 17 told me I needed to lost 50 lbs in a month or he wouldn't do the operation. In order to lose that 50 lbs he suggested I eat only unsweetened applesauce and sugar free pudding. My grandmother decided he was out of his freaking mind and we never went back.
  • victoria4321
    victoria4321 Posts: 1,719 Member
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    A few years ago when I weighed around 140lbs my dr told me "You need to go on a diet....next time you eat, take all your food then cut the plate in half" I was like huh?!

    I was a size 6 at the time and he was so fat.
  • beckyinma
    beckyinma Posts: 1,433 Member
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    HA! A few weeks ago, a nurse (also personal trainer 63 years young) who administers my allergy shots and hadn't seen me since last October told me (based on seeing me fully clothed, jeans and fitted t-shirt) that I shouldn't lose any more weight. She scoffed when I told her I was beginning a heavy lifting program. She said I'd become all muscly. um, what??? This, from a personal trainer!
  • Funsoaps
    Funsoaps Posts: 514 Member
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    The doctor who was going to remove my gall bladder when I was 17 told me I needed to lost 50 lbs in a month or he wouldn't do the operation. In order to lose that 50 lbs he suggested I eat only unsweetened applesauce and sugar free pudding. My grandmother decided he was out of his freaking mind and we never went back.

    That doctor WAS out of his mind...
  • smackadoodle
    smackadoodle Posts: 121 Member
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    At age 18 a school doctor taking my medical history said if I was a horse they'd shoot me.
    Now, at 58 plus y.o. I have outlived MANY horses thank you doctor!:drinker:
  • Funsoaps
    Funsoaps Posts: 514 Member
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    I thought NOTHING would TOP the Doctor who bragged to me "I've delivered 102 babies so far....only to send me home in full on very painful labor to the point I cannot walk...to have my daughter on my kitchen floor delivered by firefighters...yeah...great job, Doc! LOL...he said I wasn't in enough pain..........whatever...he thought I'd take 36 hours to have my first baby and he didn't want to do the work.


    Anyway...
    An endocrinologist/diabetes doctor for my thyroid, I was SEVERELY HYPERTHYROID, meaning the opposite of low thyroid and having heart palpitations, trips to the ER and I had never even been to the ER for anything before....he was OVERMEDICATING me with thyroid meds as I found out via my labs later on...but in the meantime he told me that maybe I need an anti-anxiety med instead. WTH? The website for the thyroid meds state specificially what the symptoms were for overmedication and I had all the symptoms, DOH DOC!
  • ironanimal
    ironanimal Posts: 5,922 Member
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    The doctor who was going to remove my gall bladder when I was 17 told me I needed to lost 50 lbs in a month or he wouldn't do the operation. In order to lose that 50 lbs he suggested I eat only unsweetened applesauce and sugar free pudding. My grandmother decided he was out of his freaking mind and we never went back.

    Lets do the maths here.

    50 x 3500 calories = 175,000 calorie deficit for the month
    Divide that by 30 days and we have a daily deficit of...5833.33

    So not only would you have to not eat for a month, but you would have had to burn about 3800 calories a day in exercise. I wonder if he ever operated on ANYONE.
  • Funsoaps
    Funsoaps Posts: 514 Member
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    At age 18 a school doctor taking my medical history said if I was a horse they'd shoot me.
    Now, at 58 plus y.o. I have outlived MANY horses thank you doctor!:drinker:

    How rude of that Doctor!
  • Funsoaps
    Funsoaps Posts: 514 Member
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    The doctor who was going to remove my gall bladder when I was 17 told me I needed to lost 50 lbs in a month or he wouldn't do the operation. In order to lose that 50 lbs he suggested I eat only unsweetened applesauce and sugar free pudding. My grandmother decided he was out of his freaking mind and we never went back.

    Lets do the maths here.

    50 x 3500 calories = 175,000 calorie deficit for the month
    Divide that by 30 days and we have a daily deficit of...5833.33

    So not only would you have to not eat for a month, but you would have had to burn about 3800 calories a day in exercise. I wonder if he ever operated on ANYONE.

    That doc is smoking something!
  • NoAdditives
    NoAdditives Posts: 4,251 Member
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    When I had gestation diabetes while pregnant with my son my nutritionist told me not to eat any real sugar and to use artificial sweeteners instead. She also told me not to drink juice and to avoid almost all fruits.
  • Robin_Bin
    Robin_Bin Posts: 1,046 Member
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    Too many to know where to start... luckily most of mine were less serious than others listed here...

    My (then) doctor started writing a prescription. I asked her what it was for, and she said it was for blood pressure medication. I said, "but I don't have high blood pressure". She looked and my chart again and didn't hand me the prescription. (I could maybe deal with one mistake, but two other times she tried to prescribe things... in one case I again pointed out that I didn't meet the criteria for needing it. The other time, we discovered after further testing, that I didn't have what she'd thought.)

    Another doctor told me that stomach crunches, leg lifts and sit-ups weren't real exercise and did nothing but stress your joints and back. (Now I have to agree that done wrong almost any exercise can hurt you, but at the time, I'd been doing those for about 10 years, no damage. Now, after not doing them, I'm here trying to lose weight.)

    Yoga's not exercise.

    No pain, no gain.

    An almost vegetarian diet with cheese, fish and eggs will raise your cholesterol.

    Ignore the migraines. (Never mind the pain, but recent research has indicated that not treating migraines or trying to "tough them out" may actually increase their frequency and severity.)

    Let the infection get better on its own.

    This topical antibiotic is fine for people who have allergies to that other antibiotic. And then when my skin turned bright red where I put the antibiotic and where the bandage tape was... oh that looks like a bad infection. Really a "rectangular" shaped infection?

    And in a totally different arena, a recent one... oh that problem with the Internet browser is caused by the keyboard. (Had the keyboard for years, the browser for awhile, but the patch just downloaded last night. Rolling back the patch fixed the problem, but the problem's caused by the keyboard?)
  • Funsoaps
    Funsoaps Posts: 514 Member
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    A few years ago when I weighed around 140lbs my dr told me "You need to go on a diet....next time you eat, take all your food then cut the plate in half" I was like huh?!

    I was a size 6 at the time and he was so fat.


    Wow I've been overweight for quite awhile now and no doctor even said anything to me about my weight, I'm the one who brings it up as in "help me lose weight...".

    I was 216 when I had my daughter, in my 9th month and I got on the scale and the nurse looked me up and down and she was like "No WaY'...so she had me get off and on again and I was like "yes I am 216"...but she did not believe it, she thought the scale was broken. That was actually a compliment since I always look 30 lbs more than I actually am.
  • sbillows
    sbillows Posts: 1
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    FML. I'm a pharmacist and if I hear one more physician recommend the HCG diet I'm going to scream. What? Starving my body on 500kcal a day is reasonable? Provides sustained weight loss? Fantastic! Sigh
  • wolfi622
    wolfi622 Posts: 206
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    My wife is a physician. And a good one. In her experience, patients often only listen to about half of what their docs actually say to them and the half the listen to can often get terribly distorted by the time they get home or repeat the conversation. It's shocking and sometimes amusing when a patient will call back to clarify something (which should be done a lot more than it is), to hear what the patient thought the doctor told them to do/said to them. She is a specialist, and I can tell you that the conversations are carefully recorded and placed in the patient record. I can also tell you that unless the doc is primarily a "weight loss" practice, your weight, BMI, obesity, what have you, is a very small piece of a very large picture they are looking at. I imagine that can be frustrating and feel very much like they aren't focused on what you are focused on and therefore "idiots". I know a lot of doctors, as you can imagine, and have yet to meet an idiot. Jerks, yes! Idiots, no.

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