The scope of all human knowledge is, understandably, so massive that no one person can manage to fully comprehend even a fraction of it, regardless of what that obnoxious guy at university insisted. This is why we turn to experts when we need them, but even they can be wrong sometimes.

Someone asked “When have you witnessed an “expert” get it so wrong?” and people shared their stories. Be warned, a lot of these deal with medical issues that can get rather graphic. So settle in as you scroll though, upvote your favorites and be sure to add your own tales to the comments down below.

#1

I was in the military and got appendicitis. My CO recognized my condition and sent me to the hospital before the unit started daily exercises. After a few tests and a few hours, the doctors sent me back to the barracks because my fever was ‘too low for appendicitis’. They didn’t do a white blood cell count test either. Nine hours later when the rest of the unit got back, my CO checked in on me. I couldn’t stand, walk, or hardly move. He put me in his jeep and drove me to the naval hospital emergency room and cursed them out as only a Navy officer can. They quickly determined I had acute appendicitis and I was in surgery within 30 minutes. Appendix was about to burst. I oddly still had a low fever but everything else screamed acute appendicitis. Those doctors got an earful as I vaguely remember.

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#2

Husband had knee pain and a fever. ER told him it was nothing and the fever was a fluke. After additional testing, orthopedic doctor told him he had a calf tear and told him to walk in the orthopedic boot as therapy. Never got better and knee pain intensified. Turned out there was no tear in his calf, but he did have a life threatening staph infection in his knee. He lived to tell the tale, but the infection compromised his knee cartilage irreparably because the doctor dithered around with his misdiagnosis and refused to believe the patient. It took a second opinion from an associate in the same practice to address the real issue.

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#3

At a previous job, one of my monitors broke. The head of IT came to swap it out with a brand new monitor that he unboxed in my office.

While he was setting it up, he froze and said he’d have to return it because the monitor wasn’t compatible with my computer. This was because the computer only had HDMI out and the monitor only had DVI in.

The thing was, the monitor came with an HDMI to DVI cable. When I pointed this out, he said “you can’t convert HDMI to DVI.” I tried to explain that you absolutely could, and why would they include the cable otherwise. He argued with me, boxed it back up without even trying the cable. and left.

I still think about this interaction and how he was probably making 20x what I did and yet he was an idiot.

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#4

In October of 2015, I had a GP I’d never seen before tell me that my shortness of breath, which had been growing exponentially worse over the past several months, was just an upper respiratory infection. She gave me a nebulizer treatment and sent me home.

A couple hours later, I texted my dad (also a GP, but obviously one who knows me infinitely better) to please come and listen to my chest because I was sure the other doctor was wrong. Being a doctor’s kid, it took a lot for me to go against an MD’s professional opinion and go for a second one. But I *knew* she was wrong.

Dad listened to my chest and then immediately took me to the ER. Diagnosis: extensive saddle pulmonary embolism that very likely would’ve proved fatal if it had been ignored. I was admitted and spent five days in the hospital.

My mom and my husband were ready to head to the other doctor’s place and tear her a new one. Dad took it upon himself to calmly explain to the doctor that her misdiagnosis could’ve cost me my life, and pointed out what she’d ignored.

Needless to say, I never returned to that doctor.

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#5

College anthropology professor said that Buddhist monks wore orange because it was a color not found in nature.

Uh, oranges? Mandarins? Pumpkins? Tigers? Tiger lilies? Cantaloupe? Class fired back with these and more and she got angry and ended class early. Next few classes were handled by the TA then she finally returned but lectures were super low key.

She also said women absolutely cannot get pregnant while nursing. Yeah, it is less likely to happen but not at all impossible. Our textbook even had photos of indigenous women of various cultures with children quite close in age, debunking her statement.

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#6

I had a small leak in my attic. I asked for repair quotes from 3 companies. The most expensive was $18,000.

It turned out to be porous chimney bricks absorbing water from rain and cost $35 to seal them myself.

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#7

Best friend’s wife had sore jaw. Dentist and orthodontist said it was TMJ. Eighteen months later the soreness became pain and it was diagnosed as stage 3 cancer. Treatment put it into remission for two years. Two years after that she passed away.

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#8

Went to urgent care to see if they could test for pertussis after being exposed to it. (I was new to the city and hadn’t met with new pcp yet)

NP who saw me kept talking about the pertussis “virus” and berating me for saying the person who exposed me was now taking antibiotics but hadn’t been when I was exposed. (“It’s unconscionable that they prescribed antibiotics for pertussis.”)

I felt like I was slowly going insane so I googled it just to make sure…yeah pertussis is a bacterial infection. I got out of that urgent care as fast as I could.

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#9

I read a peer-reviewed research article on Deaf babies of hearing parents who receive cochlear implants. It was comparing English language acquisition between babies whose parents learned and practiced ASL prior to the implants (they can’t get them until age 1) vs. the babies who did not get any ASL.

The babies with no ASL picked up English faster so the recommendation of these medical experts was not to teach ASL if you were getting your baby a cochlear implant.

To put it in another way, these “experts” were recommending NOT TO effectively *’communicate* with your baby for an entire year so they test better on English when they’re a bit older.

What made this insane is that ASL is a language, and we know that bilingual children test poorer in individual languages early on. Not because they’re not learning effectively, but because they are learning the same number of words in two separate languages

Anyway, I’m still outraged 6 years later.
How many more dastardly studies do people just assume are reasonable because they don’t understand basic and seemingly obvious facts?

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#10

My psychiatrist spent 4 years changing my medication (prescriptions, schedules and dosages) while I complained about my extreme sleepiness. I switched to another doctor and got a diagnosis for narcolepsy shortly after.

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#11

Brought my 18 month old to the ER after he turned red and hived up after eating peanut butter. Children’s ER doc told us that was not a typical symptom of an allergic reaction.

🤦‍♀️ that is a text book symptom of an allergic reaction to a food. Our pediatrician was not impressed with the ER doc. Yes, my son was and still is allergic to peanuts.

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#12

I had a professor explaining some method of statistical analysis and I couldn’t understand why my numbers didn’t make sense when I used it. I asked for clarification and she just repeated the same thing. When I got specific with my issue, she just said I had to be doing something wrong. Mind you, she never gave an example during the class. I tried it with information that i already had the full data set for and but it didn’t work when I used her method. When I tried to show her, all she said was, “I’ve been doing this for 15 years. You have to be doing something wrong.”.

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#13

– Dr. recommended a topical antibiotic cream for a marble sized cyst in my thigh, not on the surface.

– Same cyst, different Dr. drained it without gowning up, ruined his shirt TWICE, because after the first damage he got sprayed again.

– Same clinic, different Dr. told me my memory issues that left to me getting 8 parking tickets in one week were “probably because I didn’t want to pay for parking” Didn’t read my chart, recent meningitis- missed that I had a temporal lobe brain injury.

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#14

When a doctor told me having a baby would cure my migraines… Mate, my mother and sister would very much beg to differ.

Oh and then he said if my husband wouldn’t give me a baby, to get a new husband.

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#15

A mate went to ER with some really bad pain in his foot.

He was told by the doctor that it was gout & he needed to stop eating so much meat – my mate’s a vegetarian.

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#16

Spent 5 years in my 20’s being told I had COPD due to chronic bronchitis. I was getting colds every other month that would turn into bronchitis and I couldn’t stop coughing. I was a healthy weight, a performer at a theme park (so basically paid to work out 5-6 times a day), and had never smoked anything. They put me on what I later found out were insanely high doses of Prednisone that also wasn’t tapered correctly and I ended up with prednisone induced diabetes, although at the time I was told I was type 2 and it was because of my weight gain (which was primarily due to the prednisone.)

I finally went to an integrated medicine doctor to figure out why a previously healthy 20 something had COPD and type 2 diabetes. They asked me if I had ever been referred to an ENT? I had not. One ENT visit with CT scan later, found out I had messed up sinuses and even though I had zero symptoms at the time had an active sinus infection. And that sinus infection had likely been there the whole 5 years and would flare anytime I got sick. The post nasal drip I didn’t even know I was having was what led to the nonstop coughing. A month of antibiotics and a sinus surgery later, and I almost never get sick anymore. As soon as I was off the prednisone, by blood sugar went back to normal, no more type 2 diabetes.

It frustrates me when I think about the years spent watching my health decline due to misdiagnosis and mistreatment.

#17

A friend of mine told me about his friend’s design project for a college class. It was a folding clamshell phone. The professor of the class went on a tirade about everything that was impractical or just flat out wrong about the design, and gave the student an F.

The student later went on to work for Motorola. His design became the StarTAC.

The professor adamantly refused to apologize for getting it so wrong, even as numerous companies rushed to make their own flip phone designs.

Edit: To the professor’s credit, he was right about certain aspects of the design. The hinges of flip phones are prone to cracking and breaking from repeated use, and the cables connecting the two parts often fail after many cycles of opening and closing the phone. (Both of those things eventually happened to my StarTAC.) He was a very strict pragmatist when it came to product design, and dinged the student for a design that would eventually break from use. But he severely underestimated how many people would set those concerns aside for the sheer coolness factor.

#18

I worked for a non profit years back, whose programming was largely centered on backcountry canoeing. I was a guide for years, then a program coordinator. When the org expanded to a new part of the country, I was in charge of the crews that would explore the routes and areas for the purpose of triaging how well suited they’d be to our programs. My boss insisted on hiring an “expert” to guide us on a multi night river trip. We all knew he was an idiot from the outset, but he got the benefit of the doubt. We shared a canoe for a stretch, and at this particular set of rapids, he said there’s an eddy we wants to pull into. He said he’d say “when” and I’d do a big draw from the bow to initiate the eddy turn. The eddy came, the eddy went. He asked me what I was doing, why didn’t I draw into the eddy? Dude you said you’d say “when.” He said, well yea but I thought you’d know when. Yes, of course I knew the ideal time to draw, but that’s not how “wait until I say ‘when’” works. Then he was demonstrating “lining” a canoe in rapids. His rope management was abysmal, he was literally tangled in his own rope to the point that a fall could have been disastrous. I had to re-demonstrate his demonstration for my staff so they could see proper rope management. Then he sliced his hand open while demonstrating his version of axe safety. Then he blamed me when a colleague slipped on a rock while portaging, stating that I foster an attitude of pushing ourselves too hard. The woman literally told me afterwards that she had paused for a break and he pushed her to press on because “we’re almost there.” This guy was a total dud in every aspect of backcountry camping. We put a meal together (that he had packed) and he berated me for not “pressing the garlic.” It was minced garlic in a brine. Chances are if you do any canoeing in Manitoba, you’ve heard of this guy. Supposedly he trains Canada’s special forces in backcountry survival. Yea, right.

#19

I think often of an argument I got into with my art professor. He insisted he was going to see Michelangelo’s David at The Uffizi. I assured him it wasn’t there but down the street at a separate museum. I dug in a little but then he basically said, look, who do you think knows where that statue is, a student or an art professor?

#20

My high school guidance counselor told me my passion for video games was “a phase” and to pick a real career. i’m now a senior game developer making six figures. thanks for the motivation, mrs. johnson.

#21

Surgery friend worked with urologist that removed the wrong kidney, at trial the MD said he didn’t know there was a right and left on x rays.

#22

My grandma had hip surgery and they messed up connecting her leg and hip back together. So when it was done and they told her to try moving, she couldn’t. Her leg seriously wasn’t connected to her hip.

Doctor spent the next week berating her as she was in agony going through physical therapy. Saying things like “you aren’t even trying!” and telling our family “she’s really wasting everyone’s time.” He would be that mean to her in front of us too!!!

Once that week was up, they did another round of x-rays. They quickly wheeled her back into surgery all hush hush just saying they “had complications.” We never heard him admit anything or apologize to my grandmother. We still don’t know if it was something that could’ve been prevented or was just a genuine fluke, but he shouldn’t have treated her like that regardless.

#23

When I was in the Army National Guard, during a military exercise, the person who was serving as the S3 (operations officer) decided to just TOTALLY ignore my advice. I was a military intelligence officer. My job was to provide analysis as to what the enemy during an exercise was going to do. I went into heavy detail as to what the enemy was going to do, and basically said, “I wouldn’t do that if I was you.”

So…this officer, whose job it is to listen to the S2 and then react accordingly, just didn’t. When I explained some errors in this reasoning during the war gaming piece, he hand-waved it away and said, “We can fight through it.” I decided to protest and say that’s absolutely against the rules of this exercise. The reason is that I said IEDs took out some trucks, you can’t just ignore that.

So, when it comes time to brief the full staff, I didn’t change my analysis at all, in fact, I doubled down and used much more forceful language. The battalion commander stated it was the best intel briefing he ever received.

So, the next day the exercise goes live. Of course he goes down a route I explicitly stated “DO NOT DO THIS.” Unbeknownst to me at the time, he was interviewing to be the full time ops officer. This was supposed to just be a mere formality. He completely botched it. If this was the real world, about 25 solders would’ve lost their lives. 25…that is a very bad day.

He got mad at me for what happened. What I told him was that he could’ve just listened to me and I would’ve taken the heat if something went wrong. You’re the one who chose to go down the route I said not to. That’s on you.

#24

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

– Paul Krugman, 1998.

#25

My husband’s cousin is a veterinarian. She said raccoons are rodents. I said they were not rodents.

#26

Oh man, my partner’s mother. She claims to be a nurse but that honestly can’t be right because she seems to know absolutely nothing about the human body or illness or medicine.

Some of her greatest hits include:

My partner being severely ill with the flu and asking their mom to pick up one of those fruit/veggie smoothies so they could get some calories and vitamins into their system. This woman brings back a Frosty and says “it’s the same thing”

Insisted AIDs/HIV could not be transmitted via semen

Insisting heating pads were useless for menstrual cramps

There are others but I’ve had to repress them for fear the rage of remembering might induce a stroke.

The worst part though is that when she thinks you’re wrong about her field she becomes super smug and insufferable. She’ll laugh in your face and mercilessly mock you. But God help you if you point out and prove she’s wrong. .

#27

I’m on a domestic well system. Recently woke up to find no pressure in the header tank. Called out the local plumbing franchise and guy tells me my well has dried up and needs to be redrilled as in mega$$$… Say WHAT now?

Called out another more local guy – turns out the well control box was fried (and has probably been shorting out for years). $200 for him and $135 for a new control box and all fixed.

#28

Newly hired civil engineer joins small east coast municipality utility. He came in both guns blazing. Touted his degree. His first project was to design and send out to bid a staircase with a middle landing to access the roof of one building with the second platform leading to the top of circular concrete tank which had another set of stairs leading down into the tank.
So approximately 26’ of stairs, one platform at 12’ with the other platform at the top which was supposed to sit on the tanks top wall. We poured two concrete footers for the new stairs then hired a crane to place the stairwell. Everything on our end was performed as per the engineer’s prints. Placed the stairs and the top platform came 9-3/4’ short of the tanks wall. For a good two years, as skilled blue collar workers, we always asked did the engineer measure twice before drawing up these blueprints. The engineer who designed the staircase is now the director of the utility. Not a bad engineer in the long run but came in with an attitude and shot himself in the foot on his first project.

#29

Ophthalmologist told me I had a lazy eye. Went to get an MRI and turns out it was a brain tumor occupying a quarter of my brain. Good thing they had a last minute cancellation when we called right after leaving the eye doctor. Neurosurgeon said I wouldn’t have lived much longer than another day or two had the MRI not caught it.

#30

A number of doctors sent my sister home from the hospital when she had appendicitis. She kept going back and eventually a doctor there said “I see you’ve been here a few times and nobody’s ordered an ultrasound so we’re gonna do that”, after the ultrasound they told her she needed immediate surgery to remove her appendix.

The crazy part is my mom’s a former nurse and when the symptoms began she told my sister it sounded like appendicitis and they needed to go to the hospital right away and she also told the doctor there that she thought it was appendicitis and the guy brushed her off.

#31

My first son was born. First night in the hospital and he slept restlessly and kinda wheezing. Something didn’t seem right. We tell our midwife who agrees and gets the doc to check him out. Doc says he’s fine. Throughout the day still sort breathing a little weird, lethargic etc. Midwife again gets doc to check him out. Doc says hes fine again and says we can go home. Midwife refuses and demands tests etc. They eventually and reluctantly agree. Turns out he had strep b infection which if left untreated for much longer likely would have developed into meningitis/ permanent brain damage. Son is rushed into NICU and spent two weeks there. Luckily he is healthy today. Thank God for our Midwife.

#32

Was told repeatedly my abdominal issues was ‘women’s problems’, even had exploratory surgery looking at my reproductive system!

Turns out I had 53 years of undiagnosed celiac disease that ripped my digestive system into shreds. Massive surgery, major recovery, and I will never be well again.
But it’s ok, nothing was wrong with the baby-making equipment.
Had it been properly investigated 40 years ago – or any of the other times I presented with the ongoing debilitating pain, my quality of life would have been completely different 🤷‍♀️.
Trust the experts…

#33

I was a journeyman electrician working at a mine in Canada. I was responsible for bringing in power and control wiring into a very specialized, and very expensive piece of equipment that was built in Germany.

The German company had a rep on site that was responsible for commissioning and start up of said machine.

This guy was a massive jerk. Arrogant, unhappy human who would yell and belittle anyone in his vicinity.

There were some engineering issues. Specifically the supplied control power was at a higher voltage than the equipment was designed for.

After some ugly battles about how to bring in all the cables, the rep kicked out myself and any of our guys. Wouldn’t allow us to even be in the room and he said he would do it all himself.

He wired in everything. Was over schedule and wasting time. I knew that it was wrong. Tried to explain it to him but he wouldn’t hear it. I went to my boss and he got the same treatment.

Came the day to turn on the control power and I got asked to flip the breaker.i said no because we didn’t do the work or were allowed to QA/QC it. The German got extremely angry, yelled at everyone about how incompetent we all were and then flipped the breaker himself.

He let the smoke out of the motherboard. Tried to blame me. Got sent home in the plane the next day.

Weeks to get replacement parts. Nice memories.

#34

Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. About the financial crisis in 2008:

>”I know that most of you in this room think I’m a good economist, but I’m not a very good forecaster… I was shocked… I still think it’s a good theory. **I didn’t think they would do it against their own best interest**”.

He was referring to his faith in the efficiency of free markets and the ability of financial firms’ risk management practices to protect themselves.

#35

Went to several doctors as I was consistently tired and loosing weight. They couldn’t come up with an answer. It was finally figured out that my gallbladder was septic. How the heck it was missed for weeks between 3 doctors I will never understand.

#36

Husband was running a high fever and was generally unwell. Went to the doctor who said it was allergies. Now hubby does have allergies but it wasn’t the season and he has never in his life run a fever with allergies. A few weeks later, came back with a vengence and never went away. Just maybe stop running the fever and then come back but the general unwell kept going. Went to three different doctors. Allergies each time. Begged them to run tests, anything because this was definetly not allergies.

MRSA. It was a freaking systemic MRSA infection for three freaking months. They still can’t explain why he survived except it didn’t go into his lungs. We know exactly how he caught it which is a story in itself. But we didn’t know until he got a nasty cut that required stitches and suddenly became horribly infected even though everything was done sterile and we had to dressed properly etc. I took him to the ER and demanded a swab and other tests because I watched it swell twice its size in a few hours. This was not a normal infection. They did many swabs and tests.

What they eventually sat down and told us was he had had this for three months (based on our timeline and medical records) but somehow his body kept it supressed enough and compartmentalized sorta. Then when he had the inflamation and injury to his finger, it gave it a place to flourish and eacape so to speak and made it very clear how lucky he was to be alive.

Sometimes they really do need to look for zebras.

#37

There was that guy that made the “best” identity theft company and he gave put his actual social security number on Fox News… he had his identity stolen.

#38

My Mom is an astrophysicist at NASA but also can’t log into her home wifi without my help. She has been using the internet since the 80’s. Ooof.

#39

Last week on Joe Rogan some ostensibly “legitimate” scientist who was there to talk about UFOs was asked by Joe if stalactites or stalagmites go up. Scientist dude confidently told Joe stalactites go up and stalagmites go down. Nope. Tites come down and mites grow up.

#40

My doctor was certain I have bipolar. I have been assessed 3 times and declared not. She put me on Zoloft and I got serotonin syndrome as a result.

#41

Dr said i had a 1 inch aneurysm sitting on my brain and said they needed to get me to a higher level of care for emergency brain surgery and i wouldn’t make it by ambulance so i was careflown to a different hospital roughly 18 minute flight when i arrived and they couldn’t get my blood pressure down with a ton of bp meds the hospital i got to figured out it wasn’t an aneurysm it was actually a blood clot by that time the stroke was completed and all the damage was done, over 80 percent of the right side of my brain died from getting no oxygen. i llost all mobility in my left side. ‘y vision in my left eye, short term memory how to walk basic math how to write properly. i was 31 at the time and this was back in 2019. the second hospital i was flown to told my parents i had a 5% chance of living through the night. if i happened to survive i’d be in a vegetative state for the remainder of my life and that they would need to find a place to put me in for 24/7 care back home in Texas. at the time i was working on an oil rig in oklahoma. a year of intensive rehabilitation i got my eyesight back i relearned how to walk, do basic math shower cook money management. i rebuilt my short term memory and after 2 years i relearned how to drive. my life was irrevocably changed. but i’m grateful to still be here with my family and two children, not in a vegetative state.

#42

Witnessed it just this week. Highly recommended, top dollar electricians wired up my new boat lift. Up switch is down and down is up.

#43

I had to show a board certified neurologist how to read a test result from an overnight polysomnography and explain to him what the numbers meant.

#44

Junior high mathematics teacher confidently stating that 0/0 = 1, based on “any number divided by itself is 1.”

Any number divided by zero is undefined or indeterminate. (Some may argue infinity.).

#45

Experts claimed eggs were extremely unhealthy. later research showed moderate consumption is fine.

Source:Boredpanda

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