Medical Professionals Are Revealing The Most Ridiculous Lies Patients Have Told Them And It’s A Wild Ride

Who doesn’t love getting a peek behind the curtain of medical settings? Recently, Reddit user theedriplomat asked doctors to share the most obvious lie a patient has ever told them, and all kinds of medical professionals weighed in. Here are some of the most interesting responses…

1. “I’m a wound care specialist. I can tell you haven’t been changing this dressing properly. Because of the way it is.”

—Bearacolypse

2. “‘I didn’t drink’. Sir your blood alcohol level would kill a normal man and I can smell you from across the department. Also you fell over twice trying to stand up.”

—LegitimateLagomorph

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3. “They always drink a lot of water…which they clearly don’t.”

—Cic77

4. “I was a sonographer in a high-risk obstetrics office for years. Had a patient, 28 weeks pregnant with poorly controlled type 2 diabetes and a history of non-compliance, come in for a scan. Asked her if she had been tracking her blood sugars, and she very enthusiastically told me yes and handed me her chart for the past month. All of the entries were written in the exact same pen, and the numbers were way too consistent. She’d clearly just filled in the values for the past month in one sitting.”

—sonoandrea

5. “A pregnant woman squatted on the floor in front of me. Peed on the floor, stood up, and told me her water had just broken…ummm, no? You just peed on the floor?”

—u400mak00

6. “‘Yup, I floss.'”

—dpublicborg

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7. “Pharm tech here. ‘I take that every day!’ Bitch please, we haven’t filled that prescription in six months, and it was a one-month supply. Don’t lie to your pharmacy. Trust me, most of us are NOT judging you. Concerned? Yes. Judging? Dude, it’s your health. If you have a stroke because you haven’t taken your blood pressure meds or lose a foot because of untreated diabetes… there is only so much I can do to help you.”

—mamaknit

8. “Me: Do you smoke? Patient: No. Me: But you’re left-handed, yeah? Patient: How did you know that? Me: You have tar stains on the fingers of your left hand.”

—sam_galactic

9. “Dentist here! The man who owns the nail salon across the parking lot is my patient. Every six months, I ask him if he smokes cigarettes. Every visit, he denies it. And yet every day I watch him from my office, smoking a pack of cigarettes. Sometimes I wave.”

—CassieRamirez

10. “‘Yes, I have been doing my exercises at home.'”

—norabert

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11. “Nurse here, but I had a patient who claimed he had seizures. When he was having a ‘seizure’, I went, ‘I don’t know what to give him to stop it’ and the patient replied ‘fentanyl’ while shaking.”

—ManlyCannibalOG

12. “I had a guy adamantly denying that he smoked pot. He kept coming in every few days for what was clearly hyperemesis syndrome from pot. He REEKED of Mary Jane. I told him I don’t not care if he uses it. I medically just need to know. He refused to admit that he was using it and had to go through a whole GI referral, a scope, and all this unnecessary stuff. One day I just said, ‘I’m just going to state I know you said you don’t use pot. My concerns are that you have this textbook syndrome. Whether you are or aren’t using it, I don’t care, but if you are using it and stop you, will get all better. Saw him a couple of months later. No longer smelled of pot. Told me that he just got better and he didn’t know why.”

—saturatedscruffy

13. “A call came by ambulance stating that the patient called 911 after his abdomen spontaneously exploded. Arrived with a gaping hole in his mid abdomen. A quick X-ray showed 1,000 shotgun pellets in his belly. His significant other shot him, and he thought lying about it would keep her out of trouble. He lived, and she went to jail.”

—drgloryboy

14. “I’m a medical laboratory scientist. I’m the guy who plays with all the stuff your mother told you never to touch. One day, a labor and delivery patient drops in and decides to have her baby. She had no prenatal care. The nurse draws her blood and sends it to the lab. I do a type and screen (Blood type and Rh). We do this for all patients because lab people are paranoid. Patient tested as A Positive; in the computer, her history showed B Positive. I sent the phlebotomist to draw her blood because lab people are paranoid. Still A Positive. I dive into the history and, yep, two years previously, I was the one who typed her as B Positive.”

“This time, I draw her blood (because lab people are paranoid), let the nurses know there is a blood bank discrepancy, and call the physician. We can’t give type-specific blood if she needs it; we have to give her O Negative and start an investigation. (Blood types don’t change except for very rare circumstances.) As I was retyping her for the third time (still A Positive), the nurse called me, laughing. Our mama-to-be was admitted under her sister’s name. She had stolen her sister’s Medicaid card instead of getting one of her own. She didn’t want her folks to know she was pregnant.”

—MLSGeek

15. “My roommate from college works some hours in the ER and people still come in all the time claiming they slipped and fell ass-first on [insert object]. I would think in 2025, this would be a thing of the past. You can literally order butt plugs online and have them shipped directly to you with no one knowing. There’s no reason to keep sticking household items up there when we have so many things specifically designed to go in a butt.”

—esoteric_enigma

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16. “Not a doctor, but friends with one. A guy brought himself in because he lost his aux cord. Explained he was bored in traffic due to a bad accident and decided to experiment. Proceeded to push the aux cord into his urethra. Didn’t stop until the whole cord was inserted and panicked being unable to remove it.”

—AirplaneGomer

17. “There are way too many to count or even to really remember. People lie constantly. A guy told me he had never had surgery, but on exam, he had a clear midline laparotomy scar (big surgical scar on the abdomen). Then he told me he’d had liver cancer, and the scar was from that, so I looked up the records from the hospital where he told me he’d had that surgery. The surgery had been for the removal of a rectally inserted shampoo bottle. We were in a city with MANY hospitals, so I have no idea why he told me to check the records at the actual place he had gone for the shampoo bottle surgery.”

—casapantalones

18. “Saying, ‘I’m OK now, I want to be discharged.'”

—whitneywhisper_2

19. And lastly, “Not a doctor, but a nurse of 20-plus years. If a person is lying to you, I absolutely let them and am unbothered because they’re telling me what they want me to know about themselves. If there is a lab or test result I need to base my care around, I rely on that result to give me the information to safely care for that person. If the result returned is the opposite of what a person is telling me, I know there is a deep shame, medical-based stigma, or defense mechanism in place for the person receiving care. Medical settings are not safe spaces for everyone. Let people lie. They’re going to do it anyway to protect themselves. It often tells you what you need to know, and there is never a reason to shame anyone seeking care.”

—bonniebirdsong

What are your thoughts? Share them in the comments.

Note: Responses have been edited for length/clarity.

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