Yup. 100%. I had a 16 year old female argue with me about her weight gain. She was obese, her mother was obese. No exercise, poor diet, etc. She was convinced she was hypothyroid, and had read up on it on some quack website, and had her little script ready for me, and after I informed her that true hypothyroidism doesn't cause *that much* weight gain, she said "See, they said you would say that on the internet." Of course I checked her TSH, which was perfectly normal, and ended up sending her for diet and exercise counseling. But she was so adamant that she knew exactly what she was talking about because some moron on some message board told her about evil doctors and how we don't give out thyroid medicine or something.
Of course, on the opposite end of the spectrum from what niss was talking about are all the people who think they need antibiotics for everything. Sore throats are the worst, and I always go over the Centor criteria with the parents and explain why I will or will not prescribe antibiotics for each case.
Of course, Medicaid does not pay for the rapid strep test, and in an emergency room (yes, some parents bring their kid with a sore throat to the emergency room, and why wouldn't they, it's not like they have to pay for it, because you all are paying for it!), with these patients having no primary care doctor, if I'm not completely certain it's not a strep throat I usually end up giving antibiotics, because if I miss a strep throat and the kid gets rheumatic fever, etc, I'm sure I'll end up being sued. And I can't just do a throat culture, which Medicaid would pay for, because most of the time these patients give fake names and phone numbers because they have no intention of paying their bill, so if their culture popped positive I couldn't contact them.
You all would be shocked at the amount of free and wasteful care that is given in an emergency room for completely bullshit complaints because us doctors are scared to death of being sued by some retard. We (America) spends something like $10,000,000,000 (yes, billion) per year on chest pain admissions that are usually bullshit just because we are all scared about being burnt on those chest pains that are actually an acute coronary syndrome. I can be almost completely sure that their chest pain is musculoskeletal in nature, and their TIMI score is 1, but I still almost always admit them because if I send them home and they end up having a heart attack at home, I'm fucked. (Obviously people coming in with an acute heart attack are easy to identify and are immediately sent to cath.)
And lets not even mention the people who wait 8 hours in an ER because they don't want to pay for a $2 pregnancy test (if they only worked for minimum wage for those 8 hours...). And all the scum that "fell" yesterday, is in no pain, but wants xrays and needs to document a fall so they can start trying to sue a gas station or some other small business, or sue some driver which will ultimately affect all of our car insurance rates. The EMTALA act only requires that we provide emergency care, but in reality we provide so much free care because we are scared of turning away retarded complaints because they may ultimately be something legitimate.
