It is honestly impressive the lengths people will go to cure their illnesses, or, alternatively, to lovingly nurture their favorite delusions. And to be fair, I get it. We have all been sick. I am a doctor and I have still Googled home remedies for canker sores, tooth pain, and ingrown toenails. The difference is that experimenting with saltwater rinses is unlikely to end your life.

When it comes to actual, serious disease, however, that is usually the moment to step away from YouTube. The video suggesting you inject sodium bicarbonate to cure cancer should be considered illegal viewing. And yes, technically it would kill cancer cells, along with every other cell in your body, including the ones you are rather fond of.

The sign-out warning

I was pre-warned about my next patient. The little box on my sign-out sheet read:

“Odd female patient. Chronic abdominal pain. Duodenal ulcer with moderate pyloric stenosis. History of pain med addiction and psych issues.”

Honestly? A fairly standard sign-out. We are very familiar with “odd,” “chronic pain,” and “opioid history.” None of this prepared me for what I was about to walk into.

The moment I entered the room, something was off. I had been in this room a hundred times before, yet it looked like someone had redecorated during an earthquake. The bed was rotated 90 degrees away from the wall, facing a fully closed window. Furniture was scattered like it had lost a fight. As I walked toward the back of the bed and introduced myself, my patient came into view.

I glanced back at the sign-out. Forty-two years old. Huh. Either she hadn’t aged well, or she had lived very enthusiastically in her youth. Her hair resembled Medusa on a bad day. Her facial expression matched. But what truly caught my attention was the blanket.

Her personal blanket.

The kind that has seen decades. The kind that smells faintly of emotional trauma. The kind no grown woman should still possess.

In hospital medicine, this is known as the Blanket Sign, and it never means anything good. In my experience, every adult patient who brings their own blanket has psychiatric issues. Frankly, the ER should have a policy: If you are over 11, maybe 12, and you arrive with a fluffy blanket, treatment is conditional. Stuffed animals fall under the same rule, especially if they are being petted, or worse, if I am asked to pet them. Yes, this has happened. No, we are not discussing it today.

The encounter begins

Back to our patient.

I immediately sensed this was going to be a long encounter. I wasn’t leaving anytime soon. I pulled up a chair and settled in like a boxer preparing for a title fight. No punches were coming, just an onslaught of complaints, grievances, and tragic backstories. I needed to stay calm, alert, and emotionally armored.

She wasted no time.

The faint hum of a vacuum cleaner in the hallway was causing a migraine. The smell of freshly painted walls was also to blame. She demanded a fan. Then informed me she was itchy from hospital food because she was allergic to all of it. Everything we did made things worse, she explained, because none of it was organic or “from the earth.”

Eventually, we arrived at her abdominal pain. That is when the performance peaked.

The pain was unbearable. Ten out of 10. She whimpered while clutching her blanket like a life raft. She insisted she had only eaten two bites of food since yesterday, despite the empty Jell-O cups and pudding containers surrounding her like evidence at a crime scene.

Naturally, she couldn’t stay on topic. That is a classic maneuver. Next came her unusually high pain tolerance paired with an even higher sensitivity to pain. Ah yes, there it is. The drug-seeker reveal. No matter how dramatic the buildup, the plot always ends the same way.

She claimed a neurologist in another state told her she had more alpha waves than normal, which made her feel pain more intensely. This is, of course, complete nonsense. But she barely paused before moving on. She was also allergic to artificial food dyes, synthetic fabrics, and radio waves. This explained why she lived in the mountains, far from toxins that poisoned her body.

At this point, I was entertained. I wished I had popcorn.

The cabbage juice cure

When I finally steered us back to her ulcer and intestinal narrowing, she made it clear our medical plan was inadequate. She and a friend had done research and discovered a superior treatment. I took a deep breath and prepared myself. I literally told myself, Do not laugh. Do not smile.

According to the internet, cabbage juice, three times a day, was better than all of modern medicine.

Every instinct I have wanted to immediately call bullshit. It is reflexive. When confronted with bizarre naturopathic claims, physicians instinctively want to shut them down, or gently bang their heads against a wall.

But professionalism, and employment, prevent this.

So instead, I nodded, listened, and gently redirected her, while my inner voice screamed and my stethoscope felt increasingly throwable.

Medicine has unfortunately evolved into a “customer is always right” business. Hospital corporations care about satisfaction scores. As long as patients are happy, everything else, outcomes, logic, physician sanity, is secondary.

But medicine isn’t ordering a hamburger. A bad medical decision can kill someone. It can also destroy a doctor’s life. And despite how frustrating patients can be, we genuinely want to help them. When things go wrong, we feel it deeply. We are also legally liable.

So I told her I would research cabbage juice.

Predictably, the internet was overflowing with blogs praising its healing powers, written by earth-loving, yoga-practicing prophets of wellness. None of that matters. Physicians care about actual studies.

Eventually, I found two.

One from 1949. It had only 13 patients and they compared cabbage juice to nothing at all. Why you ask? Because modern anti-acids were not even invented yet.

The other? A study on rats in the 1970s.

As exhausting as patients like this can be, I remind myself they don’t understand what they are reading. Odds ratios, confounders, bias, none of it registers. Information feels valuable even when it is worthless.

So despite the years of training, sacrifice, and bruised pride, my job is to guide them. They may still choose the wrong path.

And when they do?

I document the hell out of it, and legally cover my ass.

George Issa is an internal medicine physician.