He had metal shards in his eye from welding.

Oh my god.

Can that happen?

Hey, guys.

Doctor Mike here.

Welcome to the third episode

of responding to Reddit threads.

This week's response video is gonna be to the thread titled

"Doctors of Reddit, what's your thank god they came in

"for a second opinion moment?"

I know mine.

Are you ready for me to tell you?

Bee-whoop.

I'm working in an urgent care,

and the last patients on my schedule

happen to be part of a family.

And when I walk into the room, they're covered in bruises.

They looked horrible, like in horrible condition.

It almost looked like they belonged

in a level one trauma center.

I asked what happened.

They told me they were coming back from a road trip.

Unfortunately, they got into a car accident

driving, like, 70 miles an hour.

They were treated, let go,

but they were still having so many symptoms

that they wanted to come see me.

My first question was, "Give me your records."

Show me what tests were done

in this place where you were treated.

They give them to me.

I look and it's like, okay,

scan one, scan two, scan three, labs, this, that.

Everything looks decent.

Where is the scan of the head

to make sure you're not bleeding inside your brain?

And they're like, "Oh, they told us we shouldn't do it.

"We didn't need it."

And I'm thinking to myself, "That's crazy."

Not only is one of the family members

on blood thinning medication,

but they were involved in a 70 mile an hour car accident.

So despite the fact that it was very difficult

to get them to the ER for the second time that day,

I made it happen.

We got them there.

And what do you know?

They were scanned.

One of the family members, bleeding into the brain,

ended up staying in the neural ICU,

and is effected to this day.

Had they gone home, not seen me, went to sleep,

the outcomes would've been much worse.

So that's my thank god for a second opinion moment.

Now it's time for me to read and react to yours.

Well, not yours, but Redditors.

Are people on Reddit called, ah, sorry.

My dad went to the same ear doctor for around nine years

due to poor hearing and was told there was nothing wrong.

When he finally went to a second doctor,

they referred him to the hospital

and found tumors in his ears that had eaten entirely

through his inner ear bones and ear drums.

He needed four operations to remove them,

one every six months.

If the second doctor hadn't offered their opinion,

he probably would've had tumors

eating through the back of his skull into his brain.

Well, I don't know if that's true,

but the fact that you're going

to see a doctor for nine years,

and you have a loss of hearing,

and they're telling you everything's fine, that's wrong.

You have a symptom.

If they're not curing the symptom

or addressing the symptom

or explaining why the symptom is there,

they're not doing their job.

Are you yawning during my Reddit thread?

That's so rude.

(Bear licks)

ER nurse here.

Had a lady in for simple pneumonia.

Her 13-year-old son was getting bored,

so I showed him some equipment.

I connected a simple heart monitor to him

and discovered he was in complete heart block.

I printed a strip and showed it to the doc.

We suddenly and unexpectedly got a cardiac patient.

Yo, that's crazy.

That's like in medical school

when we're all listening to each other's hearts,

practicing, and then we find out someone has,

like, a serious heart condition.

That's crazy.

I had a doctor in high school who was unconcerned

when I suddenly developed vertical double vision,

which was freaking out everyone in the emergency room

where I had gone initially,

and I had lost 60 pounds for no reason.

That's an insane amount of weight loss.

It was only a year or two later when I told him

that my arm would fall asleep much faster than normal

when I raise to ask it a question in class

that he thought there might be something wrong with me.

MRI ordered.

Brain tumor found.

Bear, isn't that crazy.

(Bear licks)

Bear doesn't sound concerned.

That's a crazy story to me,

because the first question you ask,

even if you're remotely concerned about a cancer history is,

"Do you have any weight loss."

Unintended weight loss, specifically.

And when they say, "Yes," that encourages me

to start scanning and looking

for things that I normally don't check for.

Having a 60 pound weight loss

should automatically be a red flag.

Raising your hand and having it fall asleep on you?

Not a huge red flag.

That could be simply an issue with cervical radiculopathy

which means that your vertebrae,

where the nerves come out between your vertebrae,

can get impinged and cause symptoms

that shoot down the nerve or cause it to get,

for you to develop some numbness or tingling.

60 pound weight loss?

(sharply exhales)

That's major disease unless proven otherwise,

and I think Bear agrees.

(kiss)

Dermatologist here.

I have seen probably five instances

of my other doctor told me it was fine that were melanomas.

A lot of times people don't want full skin exams.

There are lots of perfectly sane reasons for this,

time, perceived cost, history of personal trauma.

However, I routinely find cancers

people don't know they have.

Keep this in mind if you see a dermatologist for acne

and they recommend you get in a gown.

Yes, there's so many patients of mine

that I recommend that we do full skin exam

or maybe even offer them a referral to the dermatologist

and they pass up on it.

Melanoma's one of those cancers

that's growing in diagnoses,

and it's one that can be incredibly dangerous

because it spreads when it metastasizes

to really weird areas of the body like the eye, bone.

Like, these are problems

that you just want to avoid with careful screening.

Psychiatrist here.

A 30-year-old man with mild depressive symptoms

was in and out of the hospital fairly quickly.

He as under pressure from his home life,

living with four roommates

who were making life a bit difficult for him.

No suicidal thoughts.

He was cleared of all psychopathologies

by me and two other doctors.

A few months later he came back.

Same symptoms,

however this time he talked about five roommates.

It felt wrong, and I digged into his story,

tried to contact his roommates.

He lived alone and was severely psychotic.

I have no idea to this day

how he hid it so well from everyone.

When we scan for psychosis, we look for inconsistencies

between the patient's subjective experience of thinking,

being, and acting, and the objective reality

accepted by the general cultural norm.

This patient managed to live in a subjective psychotic world

that just fit so well with the objective reality

that tricked several psychiatrists, including myself.

In this day and age, it's very easy for that to happen.

We want to be as understanding and open

and non-judgemental as possible.

However, if you're trying to establish

whether a patient is basing their current situation

in reality, sometimes you have to ask probing questions.

But now, there's an art to this.

You can ask questions by making yourself seem very curious

as opposed to inquisitive as if, like, you're a detective.

That little change in tone can go a long way,

especially with a patient

who may be psychotic or psychologically ill.

(stammers)

(ululates)

(Annoying Orange ululates)

An elderly gentleman was brought in

by his concerned adult children for chest pain.

He wanted to believe his primary doctor

that it was some gas or heartburn,

but his son just had a gut feeling and made him go to the ER

with everyone so he could get checked out.

Heart attack was imminent.

Like, we weren't sure if treatment would take effect

in time to prevent it.

Declared code blue, means heart stop, all hands on deck.

Place went from very quiet,

empty ER to sheer chaos in minutes.

There is no doubt in my mind

that this gut feeling saved his life.

Wow.

Knowing your own body

and being a good advocate for yourself,

or having a family member that knows you well

and is a good advocate for you is crucial

in getting better health outcomes.

That's why those who don't have an extended family

or are not married generally have worse health outcomes

because they don't have someone to advocate on their behalf.

I got a moderate traumatic brain injury in October,

and the week after I got home from the hospital

I wasn't' acting like myself,

was refusing to eat, and just didn't make much sense.

My mom called the doctor a few times.

They said it was normal,

but to take me in if anything changed.

She took me in on Saturday, a week later,

because I started slurring my speech

and was unsteady on my feet.

The injury caused my sodium levels to drop from 140 to 119.

That's quite dangerous.

This in turn caused stroke-like symptoms which were,

in reality, a small series of seizures.

Yeah, electrolyte imbalances are no joke,

and sodium levels, potassium levels,

calcium levels all need to be kept in homeostasis

by your body's organs in order for you to stay alive.

Any disorder that,

whether it makes those levels go up or down,

can have life or death consequences.

Can you imagine?

Potassium can kill.

Makes you think about eating bananas.

Just kidding.

You can eat bananas and nothing bad will happen

because your own body's organs will decide

how much potassium to take in,

how much to let out, so on, so forth.

Went to my family doc

with the worst headache of my entire life.

She dismissed it, telling me it was a tension headache

and I should take a Tylenol and lay in a dark room.

First of all, when a patient says,

"I have the worst headache of my life,"

you don't even think as a family medicine doctor.

You say, "Are you certain of this?"

You clarify, quantify, ask some questions.

You send them to the ER

because the worst headache of my life,