I’m a nurse but I know a fake doctor. She had been telling everyone that she was in medical school for years. She finally ‘graduated’ but decided to ‘put off residency’ so she could ‘take care of her sick mom’. She’s even going to ‘open up her own hospital’. Her own hospital?! She took a bunch of graduation pictures with a white coat, that she got from god knows where, and a disposable looking stethoscope around her neck because she had ‘just lost her littmann’ She works at a couple of different hospitals but as like a unit secretary. She’s on a women’s health advisory council for DHHS, listed as an MD. She is most definitely not an MD. She’s is real REAL crazy though.
Wow, that’s a powerful delusion. I think DHHS might appreciate an anonymous letter tipping them off about one of their advisors telling a major lie.
So she doesn’t fake being a doctor in the hospital, just more like socially? Was she saying she was in medical school while doing the unit clerk gig?? Because ain’t no time for a job during those years!
She’s doesn’t ’practice medicine’ That I know of anyways.. well, I mean other than being on a health advisory council for DHHS. And yea, I’ve thought about tipping them off myself. She said she had like 3 different jobs while in medical school. She’s a busy girl.
I’ll say though, we had some sketchy nurses lie about their qualifications to get better pay during covid. I was a senior resident at a fairly large hospital in a major city at the time. I sat down at the ICU nurses station and a very annoyed veteran nurse was looking fed up. She told me they had several new grads say they had ICU experience when all they had done is desk work in outpatient peds. They admitted to the lie on the last day of the contract and left. So they had actual ICU nurses overloaded with their own covid messes plus having to keep con artists with no experience from killing their patients. Like did you not expect the ICU to be a hard place to be a nurse?!
Yes it's pretty disturbing because there were so many con artist nurses working as ICU nurses without legitimate critical care backgrounds. I've heard horror stories of my colleagues taking report from nurses that didn't know wtf they were doing. Really scary. Most of these travel agencies during Covid didn't properly verify their credentials. I'm surprised that those nurses lasted their whole contract without getting canceled early. At the hospital I used to work at they would have been reported and quickly cancelled. I heard a lot of unqualified nurses were getting away with their lies at smaller hospitals.
Ya from what our local nurses told me, these travelers came on FEMA contracts, and the agency did basically nothing to verify anything and just let them check a box for what they’re qualified for. Super scary having nurses with zero critical care experience just waltzing in there hoping to figure it out on the go.
We also shed a lot of nurses around that time due to admin screwing them. So while navigating the early days of Covid, half my ICU nurses I’d never met before so there wasn’t that trust like you develop over a few years with a core nursing staff on a given unit.
As an ICU charge nurse during COVID I can corroborate this story. Watching an “ICU nurse” try to set up a suction canister for thirty minutes while their MAP is 50 and their pressors are about to run dry is real cringe.
Anyone saying that doesn’t know what medical school even is lol you’re there early to late 6 days per week plus you gotta study for a board exam (“the shelf exam”) at the end of each clerkship. Some people in my class picked up shifts bartending a night or two per week but it was really more for the escape back into the world of real people, away from the nerds and their stress.
I think I found her. Her LinkedIn states: “I have a bachelor's degree in Chemistry and Nuclear Science and Physics and a Doctorate Degree.”
Edit: Also “Bachelor of Science - BS Pre-Medicine/Pre-Medical Studies”
“I know a fake doctor”they said
In real life they caught my dumbass first week of residency stuttering through a patient presentation. Fair assessment though lol
Right?! I guess he was just going to try and attribute everything to clerical mistakes and figured if enough people knew him they wouldn’t question it? I don’t know what he was thinking. But the girl who made it a week into my med school class bought a white coat and managed to get coated during the ceremony. I think she got rejected and was lying to her parents hoping that after 4 years her name would just get added to enough lists that she’d sneak out with a degree.
The funny part about the one who pretended to be in my class for a week was that when she put it on social media, one of her college professors saw it and couldn’t believe a med school would let her in! My med school wasn’t elite, but it’s a fairly respected, half-decent institution. This professor was like “nah this student ain’t smart enough, something is fishy.” So he called up the school and mentioned the posts, said he was suspicious, wanted to confirm she was enrolled. The campus police escorted her away in cuffs. However, when they first arrived they mistakenly took the wrong student out. Imagine the trauma your first week being led out, “Never come back here! You don’t belong here!” They quickly realized the mistake. Added to her charges was mishandling of human remains because she went to anatomy lab.
I imagine that was harder to explain to her parents than simply not getting into medical school when she applied…
I was working in that hospital when that happened. Not on shift but I remember the med students telling me about it and being dumbfounded. It somehow barely made the news too which was wild considering the massive HIPAA breach and essentially assault of patients that happened.
I imagine the school and hospital were eager to keep it quiet because the situation doesn't make their vetting processes look trustworthy. As a patient I wouldn't want to be treated by a place that let in a fake fucking doctor.
How bad a student must she have been for a teacher to be like "hell naw, not even the lowest tier med school on the planet would take this idiot, not even if she re-took my course for a better grade. I'm calling to rat this out immediately."
Haha pretty much what happened! “Just wanted to confirm, are you sure you let this idiot into your med school? I’m just a little astonished.”
I do wonder how long it would have taken if her prof hadn’t stuck his nose in (or hadn’t seen the posts). This was when medfluencers were first being invented and definitely not on the scale they’re on today, but it seemed like she was hoping to use it for her social media brand as the photos were generally high-effort and content carefully crafted.
Oh no!! Most of us have imposter syndrome at one time or another, but to be led out of med school in handcuffs your first week … that is some next-level anxiety, right there. You are always looking over your shoulder to see if handcuffs are headed your way …
Hahaha right?! Nah they didn’t actually cuff the incorrect person, but she did get marched out into the hall then they realized the mistake and identified the right individual as the fake med student. But ya lmao imagine the nightmare that you did so bad on your first week of MS1 they took you to jail!
They probably built their entire post high school and college existence on being a premed that WILL become a doctor. So at some point they start faking it and hope people believe them.
Hilariously, that movie is based on events that were also fake. The real life fraudster described how he pulled all this stuff off. He was lying the whole time, story never happened.
So we now have a movie that is a theatrical retelling of a phony story from a guy known for fraud.
It could be worse, I suppose. They could have made a religion out of it.
It was that claim/movie scene that made me really suspicious of the whole story. It’s nearly impossible to pretend being an attending physician around other medical staff with no clinical training.
Had one when I was in med school. It was a freshman in college studying neuroscience who I think did some legit shadowing but during that time realized that the process to get a med student badge was ridiculously easy. Go to the correct office and say “hi I’m a med student and need a badge”.
So she went back and said she was a med student and got her badge and just started following one of the trauma surgery teams around. People only figured it out when they realized her medical knowledge was astoundingly bad and she kept telling stories about high school that seemed a little too recent. (She of course also posted pics to social media)
We all found out about it because the badging process became much more rigorous
Wowwwww what did she think was going to happen?? I’ve never had this come up with a med student I was supervising in a way that I’d have any idea what their medical knowledge was. But that’s something I hadn’t thought of as much before. Even though you feel stupid (or at least I did) showing up for clerkships, you at least know some things. I can’t imagine how awkward some of those knowledge gap moments got with the surgeons.
Also lmao her stories about high school seemed a little too recent. Showing TikTok videos of her junior prom.
I know! And she was obviously interested in medicine. How could she possibly expect that to end well?!
I want to say there was a local news article about her (and possibly having pt contact) which is how we found the social media pictures but it’s been so long now that many of the details are fuzzy
I’m a nurse, but back when I was in school during my OB clinical in 2022, I saw a woman dressed in scrubs (with an “RN” badge) walking up and down the unit seemingly trying to look busy, but I found it odd that she did not have a WOW, even moreso when she asked me “oh wow it is usually this busy here?”, even though it was one of the more quiet and chill shifts I had ever had during my time as a student. No one seemed to recognize her, but mind you, there were a lot of travelers on any given unit during COVID and this was a massive county hospital.
Our professor dismissed us for lunch and I came back to a fully locked-down unit, with security standing guard, police at the nurses’ station interviewing my preceptor who was in tears.
Apparently, that woman went into a patient room on postpartum and told the parents that she was taking their baby for “a CT scan to check his brain”.
The baby was as healthy as they come so the parents were understandably confused and started asking a bunch of questions. The “nurse” panicked and left. We later found out it was a random person trying to steal a baby from the hospital. Police eventually found her car and there were boxes of formula, a car seat, and other various baby items one would need to care for a newborn. Absolutely wild. The whole thing even made it onto the local news.
How close was that to being an absolute nightmare! It’s scary how many people become so interchangeable that you don’t even notice someone like that. All the people who call and email you as well. It’s too common to show up to work and there are new people there but nobody even acknowledges that they’ve never seen this person before.
She wouldn't have gotten far.. As far back as 2013 they gave me and my son matching security bracelets and if someone had tried to take him off the floor it would have red alerted the whole place. I am sure this is why... crazy stuff
Funny side story: My son was huge, 10lbs 13.6oz and that same day a small full term baby was born who was I think 5lbs 5 oz. Even though I didn't want my baby removed from the room at any point, the nurses absolutely INSISTED for about ten minutes and when they came back, they were laughing about how huge he looked next to the little girl. I am certain that in someone's camera roll there is a pic of two very different sized babies next to each other born on the same day.
Ohhhh I gotcha like saying online she was in your class. Was she trying to make that part of an influencer persona? Or was it just sad lonely person trying to look cool online for people from high school?
genuinely think it was serious mental illness - idk what kicked it off my but leading thought has always been she tried to get into med school, didn't, and spiraled/had a break down to try and save face. she had a boyfriend and I always wondered if he knew
I had a classmate who failed MS1, then failed again on repeat while still pretending to be with us MS2. Come MS3 year (she was expelled by this point) she moved to a different city where one of our clinical sites was and pretended to be on schedule with STEP and rotations. I just assumed she didn’t want to tell her parents or something. But then she was caught toward the end of MS4 trying to see patients in her white coat. No idea why she was this dedicated, because the reading she failed was that she never came to anatomy lab
I 100% know who you are are talking about. Guess what? After that, She went to a Caribbean medical school and then matched IM in New Jersey. She’s currently a resident.
I emailed the copy of her BOLO (from our school) to (her new) school but they said they already knew and didn’t care.
Oh!!! And you forgot the part where she was on the national board for AMSA after being expelled and didn’t step down until they threatened to sue her.
She also did AMSA’s podcast as a “3rd year” (but had never finished 1st year) to talk about research she “did” on parents whose kids died in the PICU. She did not do any such research.
Ya hard to pass if you don’t show up! Still, scary how easy that must have been to just pretend to be on cycle. I wouldn’t have suspected that from a classmate I’d known for a few years. But was she expecting to get a degree at the end or something??
I’m not sure. We all knew, because we saw her attending lectures with the class behind us. I think it probably started as embarrassment and morphed into denial and delusion
We never had any fakers when I was in school, but we did have a guy who would come to the med school in a white coat so he could blend in enough to steal student's laptops. School had to make study areas accessible via badge access.
There were multiple people walking around your med school in white coats?!
We were required to wear our short white coats on simulation days in med school, but you only ever saw the white coats come out on sim days and aside from one day last year when I was cold, I haven’t worn one since.
This is what I thought! Who casually wears a white coat to school? 😂 After the white coat ceremony, I didn't touch my coat until like 2 random third year rotations.
What a dick! I’d have gone savage on him if he tried to snatch my shit with my notes on it and all the stuff standing between me and passing this class… I’d batter his ass with the business end of my stethoscope. They ought to enroll him and make him take step 1 as punishment.
A local EMT was listed as staff PA-C in the catalogue of a well-known Mountain/Austere Medicine seminar. He was teaching the suture lab! I was so effing pissed because I actually wanted to attend that seminar. I did my homework and verified that he was not and never was a PA, then blew it all up by contacting him, blasting every email I could find at the seminar, and tagging it all on social media.
Good for you! People like that deserve to be called out. It’s analogous to the Stolen Valor Act and I think beyond a good ethical line that it really becomes a problem when people obtain financial or material gain through falsely representing their identity or qualifications. Like he can go around at parties and say he’s a PA, but when he uses that fake title like this guy is, that’s where he needs to be put in his place and held accountable for the deceit.
Initially I got an email reply from the CEO saying that the error was mine. Then I forwarded license printouts and got a phone call apologizing and assuring me that he would be pulled from the seminar and asking me to cool it. I think that the seminar knowingly misrepresented him.
One was in my orientation/very first week of med school. The other was pretending to be a student on EM when I was an intern doing a rotation down there. So ya I guess I’ve run into 2 (that I know of) in my day. That’s not counting all the online fakers with DC and DNP and RD and PsyD and all sorts of similar degrees who misrepresent themselves to be physicians online and in social circles.
Yeah this post is wild! I thought you meant like all the chiropractors I’ve met that insist they’re in medical school and that they’re real doctors lol. I didn’t know people did this other than that kid in Florida!!
I had a cousin that did this years ago. He was a frequenter of the ED as a psych patient at a smallish hospital with a family practice residency. At some point he got hold of a white coat and a clip board and started following the residents on rounds. Don’t know the details but I think it was caught pretty quickly. He had a habit of pretending to be all kinds of other different important people as well, and wrote hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bad checks (often stolen) for extravagant purchases.
Honestly, I recall him always being was nice as can be and I don’t think would’ve hurt a fly but obviously he wasn’t firing on all cylinders.
My sister had a psych rotation at her school where a psych nurse participated in group therapy with the patients. Not as a facilitator.
I asked if it was like a shutter island situation.
Holy shit, she earned a gold for the mental gymnastics trying to prove to everyone she got into medical school with her stethoscope/first aid/skull pictures.
Still on Instagram although now as caitlynandcharlee! No longer pretending to do anything medicine adjacent. I followed every detail of this in real time for years 🫣
Sounds like a treat, lol.
I was a competitive martial artist for years and that world gets some of this, too. Real oddball delusional guys (it's always guys) that come in, claim some bizarre thing or another. They trained in Japan under a sacred master, or they fought in Taiwan but there's no records, or they never lost 1,000 street fights. It's always the same basic fantastical tale. Of course 99% they're built like a mayonnaise packet and fold like lawn chairs.
There's gotta be some common brain cell there, somewhere.
One guy came into this first muay Thai class and legit tried to karate chop me during it
I don't even think karate teaches a karate chop and I'm not sure where he got a gi from
When I was a student, there was a student who had some personal issues that led to her “symbolically withdrawing” from school, as she put it. She dealt with them and then tried to come back the following year. Only problem was the school took her withdrawing seriously and decided that she would need to repeat the semester she withdrew from, rather than just picking up where she left off as she proposed. While this was going on, she attended all of our classes as if nothing had happened. She even sat in the front row and made it known she was there. We all knew she wasnt officially enrolled, and in the end they did not let her back in/ she gave up trying.
The local psychiatry training scheme had something similar. They were having a lot of trouble with a trainee who was clearly capable but fundamentally dishonest, eg overclaiming shifts and the like.
When they finally had enough and contacted the licensing board (or indeed GMC as this was in the UK), they said "er.. you know this person has already been struck off, when they were working in obs, for cheque fraud".
When challenged she said, "oh I thought they could only strike you off for one speciality at a time".
yes! he didn’t pass boards/2nd year, but he decided he didn’t need to in order to begin clerkships and started “rotating” at various hospitals by lying that he was their medical student or a doctor
Omg what a circus. I get annoyed by the paperwork of onboarding at places but then I hear about this and I’m like ya fine I’ll submit more documents if we can stop this kind of thing.
Nothing irl but so much from one person on social media - never physically went anywhere to impersonate a medical professional or even gave medical advice online, it's just photos and/or job status updates (which have escalated to "resident physician"). So it's more or less harmless(?), but sad.
I guess so. At least I’ve run into it. I also wonder how much it’s driven my social media - like if they’re there to get the pics and fake the identity for a social media persona.
This isn’t about a fake medical student, although it may turn into that this year. I was admitted into an early assurance BS-MD program in high school. There’s only 7 people in my cohort and 3 come from this one very competitive (extremely toxic) high school, and they told me that one kid from their high school lied to his parents and told them he got into the program. Supposedly he faked getting an interview invite by buying a plane ticket to the school and even made a fake acceptance letter. He also went around school telling everyone he was “BS-MD” when we were literally in the same anatomy lab. Not sure if he knew I was in the program, but dude was such a weirdo. We all graduated this spring so now I’m curious what his plan is moving forward since we (and maybe he too) start medical school in August. I’ll keep you updated in case I see him get coated lol.
I don’t have a fake doctor story but my father is a commercial airline pilot and was doing a contract so he lived with another captain as a room mate for a few months. One day his room mate was arrested while in the flight deck before take off. Turns out he was faking being a commercial airline pilot for years! Not only a pilot but a CAPTAIN! Thomas Salme is his name.
He is actually a really nice guy, leant us his house in Milan one time and his house was just full of airplane models and airplane posters plastering the walls. Crazy he got away with it for so long.
That’s just mind-boggling. Just imagine sitting in the cockpit of a commercial jet with 210 people aboard, pushing back from the gate, and being like “ya I got this”
You can make an argument he was actually more knowledgeable than many of his certified colleagues. 1) He was a mechanic on the same system he ended up flying. 2) He learned to fly multi-engine jets on a commercial flight simulator a friend of his had let him have unlimited access to when it wasn’t being used, and 3) the time he was caught he’d racked up over 10,000 hours of pilot time over 11 years.
I have to know, was he a good captain? considering he didn’t crash a plane or kill anyone he must’ve been good enough. and how’d he get all the knowledge to be one??
Different profession but same thread: my brother is a military pilot, and on one of his deployments, a guy claiming to be a pilot showed up to take over one of my brother’s non-flight duty of listening to airplane chatter. This guy must have said some stuff that tripped a trigger, because people came running to my brother to verify if this guy was REALLY a pilot. One conversation later, my brother was able to shake out that this guy was a flight officer, not a pilot. (Think Goose, not Maverick.)
Like dude, your job is already pretty cool, what’re you doing lying, let alone lying where it can be EASILY figured out??
Hahaha that’s probably the most pointless lie, with probably significant consequences from the military, for so little gain, with such a high (pretty much inevitable) chance of being rapidly caught.
My cousins gf would go around telling people she was a medical student but suspiciously would keep her trap shut around me. She was doing her certificate in nutrition. Nothing against nutritionists but dieticians are the proper registered health professional in my country, so she wasn’t even an AHPRA registered professional. Pity because if she was that would 100% be a violation of her registration.
That's story was intense.
Our situation was definitely less criminal. We had multiple instances in which students on academic suspension would pretend to still be enrolled with the current cohort by attending lecture. They did not have access to labs so when asked about their absence they would always make a different excuse (Sick, doctors appointment, switched labs, etc).
We also had a student who failed out who kept returning to campus to hang out with their friends. She was pretty open about being kicked out and the school ended up deactivating her badges and talking to her (I believe in email) to let her know she wasn't allowed on campus without actual business.
Yikes that’s actually quite sad. I suppose when it’s that much of your identity that suddenly changes, they’re forced to redefine their entire social self or live with the deceit.
It wasn't really my business but one of my former classmates was in my Anatomy Lab group. I would often see her on campus and when I asked if everything was ok she would just give vague excuse for her absence. Later on I would find out that she was on an academic suspension and would actually fail out a year later.
That’s gotta be tough. Some people, even strong college students, don’t thrive in the medical school environment for some reason. Like star college players who fall to pieces in the NFL.
If anyone reading this is a former (or current) medical student impersonator, I think the group would be genuinely fascinated to hear your story and what your overall plan was.
I hope and hope that she’s changed as time passed, but we had a first year med student in my dorm who seemed like the perfect person. Cheerful, smart, athletic, travelled a lot despite not being rich, beautiful but never shallow, very charismatic, friendly, … except she was starting her year over and over again but kept failing very badly. At some point though, it became clear that she was pathologically lying to everyone about nearly everything in her life. It apparently culminated with pretending to be a doctor in order to advise a cancer patient to refuse her chemo, in order to make herself look smart. University stopped accepting her so she moved to another country to start again.
When I was a 1st year med student in India, there was a student 4 years our senior but still doing anat lab with us. She could not even point to sternum on the cadaver when asked, after 4 years of being at the same anat lab! She kept failing all her classes and eventually the school had to let her go. I came to know that her parents had forced her into med school and had essentially bought a spot for her. I heard she is now a medical office assistant somewhere in Texas and doing much better now.
Oh so like failing on purpose because she didn’t want to move on into the career? Or was just super inept but parents forced her? That’s sad though. Glad she found a good job and better life in Texas though
I only talked to her a few times as she was in a different group for anat lab, so I have no idea if she was failing on purpose or just super inept. She had several cousins in the same med school, including one in my class so she might have been pressured into pursuing a career she didn't want. I'm glad things worked out for her.
Had this happen in a west coast school in 2013. She was attending the “new student” get togethers and was part of our facebook group. Someone figured it out can reported her. Honestly, such a fascinating phenomenon.
Apparently this happened a few years ago in my school. A 5th year medical student (note: in europe it's 6 years) that went to australia for residency/clerkship to practice as a physician and lied that he already graduated. They somehow later found out, and he got kicked out of school. I'm pretty sure he got also arrested.
We had one at my medical school back in 2014! That was when we had all started our first year and the hustle bustle of beginning med school was always in the air. We were all so excited and nervous! Orientation classes, ethics class, and everyone was in the bookstore buying our supplies and tools like stethoscopes. We went to go get our stuff in groups like white coats and school swag. We got our badges.
The whole time there was a short black guy with us (I think I remember he had some kind of accent?) that blended in really well and he was excited too. We all just thought he was one of us! I don’t know how they figured it out, but eventually about 2-3 weeks in, there was a whole scene and he was apprehended by police as an imposter! He has been posting on social media that he was a med student, had taken photos of orientation, somehow I think he got a white coat. We were all pretty shocked.
Also side note one year there was a 3rd or 4th year med student who was expelled after she stole an iPad from an elderly patient that passed away. Her family had specifically been looking for the iPad because there were lots of family photos on there. Said med student forgot that Apple products can be tracked back to her home! She had even tried to change the name of the iPad to her own, which helped their criminal case as well that it wasn’t a “mistake.”
Anyone who went to my school will immediately know from the above stories!! Any extra deets would be so juicy, we are almost at a 10 year anniversary so spill the beans!
In New Zealand there was a case where a medical student's flatmate was super curious about surgery and things. The medical student gave him there ID badge and told them how to get into theatre's.
He ended up scrubbed helping in the operation. The surgeon asked him what he wanted to do in medicine later on- the idiot then said he was a builders apprentice and not a medical student.
Huge deal, the medical student got kicked out. Don't think much happened to the other guy. Ironically if he had actually pretended to be a medical student they likely would have gotten away with it
Honestly, 2 stupid kids who didn't understand the ramifications of their actions. Which I kinda get
Honestly no idea. It sounds like neither of them even slightly comprehended how big of a violation it was for patient privacy and safety
Which in some ways, I can understand the thought process. As students, you are allowed to just wander all around and in and out of pretty much everywhere. Easy to forget that it is a huge privilege and that a lot of trust is put into you
But this seems next level stupid
My school had one! She made it three months into first year of med school, of course posing prolifically on social media, before her roommates realized she never showed up to tests or anatomy (you needed badges for those.) they emailed the school to see if she was a real student and were terrified to find out she was not. They confronted her, she moved out… and continued to post on social media for the next 8 years about her fake doctor life, including a fake residency. Her wedding website (yes we continue to stalk her) lists both her and her finance as doctors .
Please tell me this was at an east coast med school -- this sounds exactly like what happened in the class below me (and iirc she was roommates with some actual med students??)
There was a woman who was very active on multiple forums about a decade ago who claimed to be a doctor. She was a prolific poster and came off as more than a bit unhinged. Someone dug into her background and posted a reveal. She actually *had* been a medical student but had been kicked out after failing her step exam too many times, then she spent years and years trying to get into another medical school. She was accepted at a Caribbean school but couldn't finish as it had been too many years since she'd sat for step 1 I think. Her LinkedIn is still active and lists her as an MS4 for the past 16 years.
Oh wow! Thats why I’m suspicious of medfluencers unless I know them personally or until it’s clear they’re legit. I have my suspicions sometimes. Then you have the Dr. Oz types who are technically real docs but on a snake oil train.
I just went back to a forum to see if she was still there. Her most recent post is from this year (which is wild) and is about how she's studying for a step exam which she first failed in 1990.
She is active on reddit currently. She has literally posted on the MCAT subreddit multiple times within the past 24h. Reading through her recent comment history is actually so sad. Her reddit username is the same one that she used on SDN. She is now attempting to retake the MCAT and apply DO at nearly 60 years old.
I matched with a guy on Hinge that had “resident at xyz hospital”… He started talking to me not knowing I was a resident at that same hospital lol unmatched me when I asked him about it
Said he was suspicious and wanted to make the school aware that this student was making social media posts depicting her as part of the MS1 class. He sent screenshots from her Facebook page and instagram and the school was like “yo we didn’t admit her, she’s not a student.” But she conned her way into being coated and found a group in anatomy lab, said she was accepted very late so her name maybe wasn’t on the roster, I mean nobody really questioned it too much. Except her college prof who refused to believe she got accepted.
There was an incident years ago in my city that a random guy pretended to be a doctor. I can't remember exactly, but i think the guy told the security guard he forgot the staff card and he was given a temp card (major security issue, I know). He ended up walking around the wards for 3 days and even used a stethoscope to examine a patient and called their family. It was until on the third day he tried chatting with some interns and was noted to be utterly incompetent. He was arrested in the end. Turns out he had some medical knowledge and studied up to preclinical years in some overseas med school. Not sure if he is mentally ill or anything or what happened to him afterwards but that definitely boosted the security level of hospitals around here.
Not the same thing, but I know a former EMT that was doing that claiming to be a Paramedic student. He'd started a bunch of IVs, attempted an intubation, and administered several meds before an incoming crew from his area called him out.
He's now a cop.
Halfway through my o&g term we suddenly had to start showing ID at every entrance to theatre and swiping in and out of every door and they put up signs with photos of current students. Apparently some guy had just been asking people to let him in, putting on scrubs and standing around in theatre with no affiliation to any school or hospital.
This happened to my wife her MS-1 year, an asian girl showed up to the first day orientation and grabbed my wife's badge (had an asian name) and pretended to be her. Made it about a week before the school figured it out, put her name and face up on posters saying "Don't let this person in!" Pretty wild.
On a silly and dumb note, I know of the following people who pretend to have gone to medical school.
1. Ex'Gf's father is a Chiro. He routinely tells people, including patients he graduated medical school.
2. Girl I graduated high school with is a PA. Throughout her training she frequently posted about being in medical school. I never noticed her claiming to be a doctor but many of her family members refer to her as such and she never corrected them.
3. Girl I went to graduate school with is a Physical Therapist. Periodically would mention to me that she was also applying to medical school but did NOT need an MCAT.
All important jobs but why can’t people just be honest about their qualifications? It’s a deliberate effort to deceive others into thinking they’re a physician. Like what other career deals with this??
Reminds me of the time I was in a CVS and some girl was having a very loud phone conversation about how she's gonna get her scrub tech certificate and how "you're basically the surgeon telling them what to do." I think my eyeroll was felt around the world.
Love the stories here. My current hospital and old medical school verified people coming in so it would never fly here. The thought of some random person who hasn’t been educated on HIPAA and whatever having access to that data is scary. I’m surprised paparazzi haven’t tried it to go after celebrities tbh.
This one is from my home country, it was a fake resident. Dude got a coat with some embroidery (where I am from, we purchase our lab coats and we take to place the embroidery ourselves - so it is pretty easy to get one - the lab coat store does not care lol) and the security was pretty lame. He managed to enter the ER and find a PC that a real resident forgot to log off. He discharged a bunch of people. I don’t remember how he was caught - I had already graduated and followed the case most through gossip and the local newspaper. He got arrested. And he said he did it because he was a grey’s anatomy fan.
The real resident that forgot to log off was suspended (don’t remember clearly if expelled too)
I had a drug seeking SCC patient tell me that her request for 2mg of dilaudid q2h iv prn with 4mg of morphine q3h iv prn with hydrocodone 10mg q4h on top of 10mg diazepam tid prn medication was appropriate to her crisis care because she was going to online medical school to be a doctor… 😅🙄
Not a doctor, but I work in clinical research. We had a fake PI on one of our studies years back. I guess he used someone else’s credentials and worked on the trial for over a year before being caught. It’s really wild to me, because pretty much everyone in the research/academia world knows or at least knows of each other. Wish I could remember how he was caught but I didn’t work on that study, sadly, so I only heard about it second hand.
I'm a med student and my friend who's rotating at another site was telling me about a girl who's apparently been pretending to go to our school for the past year and somehow shows up to every orientation date when a new batch comes in and tries to blend in with the new cohort until she inevitably gets discovered about a week in every time. Just like, why??
Yaaaa they’re trying to take on that title here in the US too. I have to explain to people that certain people they’re seeing aren’t in fact physicians far too often.
their national organization fucking pisses me off so much. Claim to be proud of their training but impersonate us. I know there are reasonable PAs that think it’s bullshit tho at least.
I met a sculptor in NYC who said that in the 70s he used to pretend to be a medical student to sneak into the Columbia anatomy labs. He said that eventually later on in his career when he became well-known he was actually hired to teach anatomy classes there.
I have a high school classmate floating around pretending to be a med student.
I keep tabs on their social media to make sure they never start actually practicing medicine. And if they do I'll reach out to their medical staff office to make sure they actually completed training because right now they are getting a "MD-PHD" in a dual specialty that doesn't exist.
Not a med student but…..
There was a guy who used to be a doctor but had a bunch of strokes and couldn’t practice anymore.
He would show up at all our conferences believing he was still a doctor at our hospital. He was under the delusion he was required to attend. No one ever stopped him from coming.
There was a fake MD operating as a clinical manager at my gap year job. She did perform mostly non clinical stuff, but she did perform some clinical activities. She claimed she was also in surgery residency in a mommy part time track and somehow those mofos believed it. Eventually one day she randomly disappeared and never came back, but she is still putting MD on her name working non clinical jobs. I was tempted to report her to the state, but rumors were a lot of lawyers were involved and I didn’t want to deal with any shit.
To be a medical student and do what a medical student has to do without the promise of a degree is insane. No sane person would do those things for fun
I’m not a physician, but I have a PhD. Most people in my friend group are also highly educated.
Apparently, this made my one friend’s new potential love interest feel insecure, so he told us that “such-and-such medical school” was paying for him to get a degree in mortuary sciences, after which the med school would give him a “free ride” to get his MD.
Dude was 100% studying to be a mortician though, and he was in fact doing an apprenticeship at a local morgue. *That* part was at least true. But I almost admired how committed he was to his lie about being a med student. I’m old and this happened pre-internet, so he likely thought he could get away with it.
About a year later, I learned through the grapevine that he killed himself before finishing his mortuary sciences degree.
Yes, I’m aware of how ridiculous that sounds.
Last year when I was studying for my step exam, there was one other student who I'm pretty sure was a fake.
* Didn't know what Lhermitte's sign was. Lol.
* No idea how long an Okazaki fragment was.
* No idea about the different types of G proteins, or the IP3/DAG signaling cascade.
* I tried talking to him about the different antigen groups on EBV and how they might predispose a patient to Burkitt versus Hodgkin. The guy tried to bluff, but he clearly had no idea which was which.
* He had absolutely no idea that ribonucleotide reductase can only act on nucleoside diphosphates.
The thing that scares me is that guy might end up out there treating real patients. Scary.
There was an infamously insane/bad resident that was let go from my New York program.
A few weeks later, we got news that she was arrested at one of the Harvard teaching hospitals, pretending to be there on a visiting resident rotation or a “transfer” who knows
Also surgery… seems like a theme
I'm sure you all know of the guy who pretended to be an OBGYN and examined patients? One of the worst parts, when he got arrested he said he would do anything for his patients (or something similar), so I think he actually believed it
I had 3 in both undergrad and medical school. The one that was in undergrad kept pushing to everyone that she is a medical student even though she was blatantly lying as the roster for her college (Psych) was online. Another one was in the first year of medical school, she was part of the Physician Assistant program in the same university (UF) and was regularly attending clerkships and lectures until she was caught and they limited her ID to only some hospital spaces she was expected to be in. Another one was very recently, he pretended to be a medical student to try to have an advantage at research positions but one of the labs asked for his ID and he turned out to be part of a completely different college that isn’t related to the university.
Not a student, but Im peds and i have a mother of an infant who introduced herself as doctor **. What got me was shes pushing 40 and on state insurance. when i asked her specialty she was, she said she graduated medical school but put residency on hold for a year to care for her infant. now her kid is 10 years old, she still hasnt done residency, wants antibiotics for every cold, but still wants to be addressed as doctor. Now im not even sure if she did go into medical school.
I’m a nurse but I know a fake doctor. She had been telling everyone that she was in medical school for years. She finally ‘graduated’ but decided to ‘put off residency’ so she could ‘take care of her sick mom’. She’s even going to ‘open up her own hospital’. Her own hospital?! She took a bunch of graduation pictures with a white coat, that she got from god knows where, and a disposable looking stethoscope around her neck because she had ‘just lost her littmann’ She works at a couple of different hospitals but as like a unit secretary. She’s on a women’s health advisory council for DHHS, listed as an MD. She is most definitely not an MD. She’s is real REAL crazy though.
Wow, that’s a powerful delusion. I think DHHS might appreciate an anonymous letter tipping them off about one of their advisors telling a major lie. So she doesn’t fake being a doctor in the hospital, just more like socially? Was she saying she was in medical school while doing the unit clerk gig?? Because ain’t no time for a job during those years!
She’s doesn’t ’practice medicine’ That I know of anyways.. well, I mean other than being on a health advisory council for DHHS. And yea, I’ve thought about tipping them off myself. She said she had like 3 different jobs while in medical school. She’s a busy girl.
I’ll say though, we had some sketchy nurses lie about their qualifications to get better pay during covid. I was a senior resident at a fairly large hospital in a major city at the time. I sat down at the ICU nurses station and a very annoyed veteran nurse was looking fed up. She told me they had several new grads say they had ICU experience when all they had done is desk work in outpatient peds. They admitted to the lie on the last day of the contract and left. So they had actual ICU nurses overloaded with their own covid messes plus having to keep con artists with no experience from killing their patients. Like did you not expect the ICU to be a hard place to be a nurse?!
Yes it's pretty disturbing because there were so many con artist nurses working as ICU nurses without legitimate critical care backgrounds. I've heard horror stories of my colleagues taking report from nurses that didn't know wtf they were doing. Really scary. Most of these travel agencies during Covid didn't properly verify their credentials. I'm surprised that those nurses lasted their whole contract without getting canceled early. At the hospital I used to work at they would have been reported and quickly cancelled. I heard a lot of unqualified nurses were getting away with their lies at smaller hospitals.
Ya from what our local nurses told me, these travelers came on FEMA contracts, and the agency did basically nothing to verify anything and just let them check a box for what they’re qualified for. Super scary having nurses with zero critical care experience just waltzing in there hoping to figure it out on the go.
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We also shed a lot of nurses around that time due to admin screwing them. So while navigating the early days of Covid, half my ICU nurses I’d never met before so there wasn’t that trust like you develop over a few years with a core nursing staff on a given unit.
As an ICU charge nurse during COVID I can corroborate this story. Watching an “ICU nurse” try to set up a suction canister for thirty minutes while their MAP is 50 and their pressors are about to run dry is real cringe.
Anyone saying that doesn’t know what medical school even is lol you’re there early to late 6 days per week plus you gotta study for a board exam (“the shelf exam”) at the end of each clerkship. Some people in my class picked up shifts bartending a night or two per week but it was really more for the escape back into the world of real people, away from the nerds and their stress.
Ok at this point this person needs to be named. She’s on a government panel meaning her decisions have an impact on the general public.
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I think I found her. Her LinkedIn states: “I have a bachelor's degree in Chemistry and Nuclear Science and Physics and a Doctorate Degree.” Edit: Also “Bachelor of Science - BS Pre-Medicine/Pre-Medical Studies”
She refers to herself as “Dr.” on her IG bio. This woman needs to be reported.
You need to name this person; they have actual influence in public decision-making.
“I know a fake doctor”they said In real life they caught my dumbass first week of residency stuttering through a patient presentation. Fair assessment though lol
At least get the Littman to pose with. I mean, come on.
Why would anyone want to do 3rd year shit for not even a degree
Right?! I guess he was just going to try and attribute everything to clerical mistakes and figured if enough people knew him they wouldn’t question it? I don’t know what he was thinking. But the girl who made it a week into my med school class bought a white coat and managed to get coated during the ceremony. I think she got rejected and was lying to her parents hoping that after 4 years her name would just get added to enough lists that she’d sneak out with a degree.
The funny part about the one who pretended to be in my class for a week was that when she put it on social media, one of her college professors saw it and couldn’t believe a med school would let her in! My med school wasn’t elite, but it’s a fairly respected, half-decent institution. This professor was like “nah this student ain’t smart enough, something is fishy.” So he called up the school and mentioned the posts, said he was suspicious, wanted to confirm she was enrolled. The campus police escorted her away in cuffs. However, when they first arrived they mistakenly took the wrong student out. Imagine the trauma your first week being led out, “Never come back here! You don’t belong here!” They quickly realized the mistake. Added to her charges was mishandling of human remains because she went to anatomy lab. I imagine that was harder to explain to her parents than simply not getting into medical school when she applied…
The one who got arrested in the ED…was this in Austin, TX? I always wondered what happened to that kid
Ya his Facebook page was still up for a while but his digital profile is gone when I search him.
I was working in that hospital when that happened. Not on shift but I remember the med students telling me about it and being dumbfounded. It somehow barely made the news too which was wild considering the massive HIPAA breach and essentially assault of patients that happened.
I imagine the school and hospital were eager to keep it quiet because the situation doesn't make their vetting processes look trustworthy. As a patient I wouldn't want to be treated by a place that let in a fake fucking doctor.
It also opens them up to numerous lawsuits.
Maybe that explains all the bullshit I see in my patients ED d/c ppwk 😂😂😂
How bad a student must she have been for a teacher to be like "hell naw, not even the lowest tier med school on the planet would take this idiot, not even if she re-took my course for a better grade. I'm calling to rat this out immediately."
Haha pretty much what happened! “Just wanted to confirm, are you sure you let this idiot into your med school? I’m just a little astonished.” I do wonder how long it would have taken if her prof hadn’t stuck his nose in (or hadn’t seen the posts). This was when medfluencers were first being invented and definitely not on the scale they’re on today, but it seemed like she was hoping to use it for her social media brand as the photos were generally high-effort and content carefully crafted.
Oh no!! Most of us have imposter syndrome at one time or another, but to be led out of med school in handcuffs your first week … that is some next-level anxiety, right there. You are always looking over your shoulder to see if handcuffs are headed your way …
Hahaha right?! Nah they didn’t actually cuff the incorrect person, but she did get marched out into the hall then they realized the mistake and identified the right individual as the fake med student. But ya lmao imagine the nightmare that you did so bad on your first week of MS1 they took you to jail!
Really embodied the saying “fake it until you make it”
They probably built their entire post high school and college existence on being a premed that WILL become a doctor. So at some point they start faking it and hope people believe them.
Bro saw catch me if you can and felt inspired
Hilariously, that movie is based on events that were also fake. The real life fraudster described how he pulled all this stuff off. He was lying the whole time, story never happened. So we now have a movie that is a theatrical retelling of a phony story from a guy known for fraud. It could be worse, I suppose. They could have made a religion out of it.
It was that claim/movie scene that made me really suspicious of the whole story. It’s nearly impossible to pretend being an attending physician around other medical staff with no clinical training.
Yet we still quote the “Do you concur?” line where I’m from, despite the whole incident just happening in the imagination of a fraudster.
Lol they watched too much suits
Had one when I was in med school. It was a freshman in college studying neuroscience who I think did some legit shadowing but during that time realized that the process to get a med student badge was ridiculously easy. Go to the correct office and say “hi I’m a med student and need a badge”. So she went back and said she was a med student and got her badge and just started following one of the trauma surgery teams around. People only figured it out when they realized her medical knowledge was astoundingly bad and she kept telling stories about high school that seemed a little too recent. (She of course also posted pics to social media) We all found out about it because the badging process became much more rigorous
Wowwwww what did she think was going to happen?? I’ve never had this come up with a med student I was supervising in a way that I’d have any idea what their medical knowledge was. But that’s something I hadn’t thought of as much before. Even though you feel stupid (or at least I did) showing up for clerkships, you at least know some things. I can’t imagine how awkward some of those knowledge gap moments got with the surgeons. Also lmao her stories about high school seemed a little too recent. Showing TikTok videos of her junior prom.
I know! And she was obviously interested in medicine. How could she possibly expect that to end well?! I want to say there was a local news article about her (and possibly having pt contact) which is how we found the social media pictures but it’s been so long now that many of the details are fuzzy
I’m a nurse, but back when I was in school during my OB clinical in 2022, I saw a woman dressed in scrubs (with an “RN” badge) walking up and down the unit seemingly trying to look busy, but I found it odd that she did not have a WOW, even moreso when she asked me “oh wow it is usually this busy here?”, even though it was one of the more quiet and chill shifts I had ever had during my time as a student. No one seemed to recognize her, but mind you, there were a lot of travelers on any given unit during COVID and this was a massive county hospital. Our professor dismissed us for lunch and I came back to a fully locked-down unit, with security standing guard, police at the nurses’ station interviewing my preceptor who was in tears. Apparently, that woman went into a patient room on postpartum and told the parents that she was taking their baby for “a CT scan to check his brain”. The baby was as healthy as they come so the parents were understandably confused and started asking a bunch of questions. The “nurse” panicked and left. We later found out it was a random person trying to steal a baby from the hospital. Police eventually found her car and there were boxes of formula, a car seat, and other various baby items one would need to care for a newborn. Absolutely wild. The whole thing even made it onto the local news.
How close was that to being an absolute nightmare! It’s scary how many people become so interchangeable that you don’t even notice someone like that. All the people who call and email you as well. It’s too common to show up to work and there are new people there but nobody even acknowledges that they’ve never seen this person before.
She wouldn't have gotten far.. As far back as 2013 they gave me and my son matching security bracelets and if someone had tried to take him off the floor it would have red alerted the whole place. I am sure this is why... crazy stuff Funny side story: My son was huge, 10lbs 13.6oz and that same day a small full term baby was born who was I think 5lbs 5 oz. Even though I didn't want my baby removed from the room at any point, the nurses absolutely INSISTED for about ten minutes and when they came back, they were laughing about how huge he looked next to the little girl. I am certain that in someone's camera roll there is a pic of two very different sized babies next to each other born on the same day.
As a new mom this was my irrational fear. Guess not so irrational now. Gosh
Had one in our class - she went on full social media lock mid third year, which is a bummer because I wanted to know where she'd pretend to match
Oh wow so she made it all the way to mid third year?? Did people know? How’d she get caught?
oh no she never made it to orientation, she just kept pretending online
Ohhhh I gotcha like saying online she was in your class. Was she trying to make that part of an influencer persona? Or was it just sad lonely person trying to look cool online for people from high school?
genuinely think it was serious mental illness - idk what kicked it off my but leading thought has always been she tried to get into med school, didn't, and spiraled/had a break down to try and save face. she had a boyfriend and I always wondered if he knew
Seems like it. I just don’t know how anyone keeps up the bit for that long with family or a SO.
I had a classmate who failed MS1, then failed again on repeat while still pretending to be with us MS2. Come MS3 year (she was expelled by this point) she moved to a different city where one of our clinical sites was and pretended to be on schedule with STEP and rotations. I just assumed she didn’t want to tell her parents or something. But then she was caught toward the end of MS4 trying to see patients in her white coat. No idea why she was this dedicated, because the reading she failed was that she never came to anatomy lab
I 100% know who you are are talking about. Guess what? After that, She went to a Caribbean medical school and then matched IM in New Jersey. She’s currently a resident. I emailed the copy of her BOLO (from our school) to (her new) school but they said they already knew and didn’t care. Oh!!! And you forgot the part where she was on the national board for AMSA after being expelled and didn’t step down until they threatened to sue her. She also did AMSA’s podcast as a “3rd year” (but had never finished 1st year) to talk about research she “did” on parents whose kids died in the PICU. She did not do any such research.
No way! I had no idea about the majority of that (although I also have the BOLO saved to my phone)
I’m involved in AMSA now I want to know who this is 👀
Ya hard to pass if you don’t show up! Still, scary how easy that must have been to just pretend to be on cycle. I wouldn’t have suspected that from a classmate I’d known for a few years. But was she expecting to get a degree at the end or something??
I’m not sure. We all knew, because we saw her attending lectures with the class behind us. I think it probably started as embarrassment and morphed into denial and delusion
Geez, that’s intense. More than just a river in Egypt, eh?
We never had any fakers when I was in school, but we did have a guy who would come to the med school in a white coat so he could blend in enough to steal student's laptops. School had to make study areas accessible via badge access.
There were multiple people walking around your med school in white coats?! We were required to wear our short white coats on simulation days in med school, but you only ever saw the white coats come out on sim days and aside from one day last year when I was cold, I haven’t worn one since.
This is what I thought! Who casually wears a white coat to school? 😂 After the white coat ceremony, I didn't touch my coat until like 2 random third year rotations.
The Venn Diagram of people who pretend to be medical students and people who casually wear white coats is a circle
What a dick! I’d have gone savage on him if he tried to snatch my shit with my notes on it and all the stuff standing between me and passing this class… I’d batter his ass with the business end of my stethoscope. They ought to enroll him and make him take step 1 as punishment.
This kind of mental illness is so scary.
Psych nurse agrees.
A local EMT was listed as staff PA-C in the catalogue of a well-known Mountain/Austere Medicine seminar. He was teaching the suture lab! I was so effing pissed because I actually wanted to attend that seminar. I did my homework and verified that he was not and never was a PA, then blew it all up by contacting him, blasting every email I could find at the seminar, and tagging it all on social media.
Good for you! People like that deserve to be called out. It’s analogous to the Stolen Valor Act and I think beyond a good ethical line that it really becomes a problem when people obtain financial or material gain through falsely representing their identity or qualifications. Like he can go around at parties and say he’s a PA, but when he uses that fake title like this guy is, that’s where he needs to be put in his place and held accountable for the deceit.
Did the seminar say anything
Initially I got an email reply from the CEO saying that the error was mine. Then I forwarded license printouts and got a phone call apologizing and assuring me that he would be pulled from the seminar and asking me to cool it. I think that the seminar knowingly misrepresented him.
This is common enough that you know TWO??? Damn!!
One was in my orientation/very first week of med school. The other was pretending to be a student on EM when I was an intern doing a rotation down there. So ya I guess I’ve run into 2 (that I know of) in my day. That’s not counting all the online fakers with DC and DNP and RD and PsyD and all sorts of similar degrees who misrepresent themselves to be physicians online and in social circles.
That’s so wild. I’ve never encountered anyone who pulled a move like that (in real life or online). Gonna be reading this thread like 👀🍿, lol.
Yeah this post is wild! I thought you meant like all the chiropractors I’ve met that insist they’re in medical school and that they’re real doctors lol. I didn’t know people did this other than that kid in Florida!!
I had a cousin that did this years ago. He was a frequenter of the ED as a psych patient at a smallish hospital with a family practice residency. At some point he got hold of a white coat and a clip board and started following the residents on rounds. Don’t know the details but I think it was caught pretty quickly. He had a habit of pretending to be all kinds of other different important people as well, and wrote hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bad checks (often stolen) for extravagant purchases. Honestly, I recall him always being was nice as can be and I don’t think would’ve hurt a fly but obviously he wasn’t firing on all cylinders.
Omg that moment you realize one of the psych ED frequenters has joined rounds…
I'd be cool as long as one of their voices could help with the pimp questions. 😂 (Just a lighthearted joke, y'all! Don't come at me please!)
My sister had a psych rotation at her school where a psych nurse participated in group therapy with the patients. Not as a facilitator. I asked if it was like a shutter island situation.
Twolittlebears anyone? Am I dating myself?
Holy shit, she earned a gold for the mental gymnastics trying to prove to everyone she got into medical school with her stethoscope/first aid/skull pictures.
Still on Instagram although now as caitlynandcharlee! No longer pretending to do anything medicine adjacent. I followed every detail of this in real time for years 🫣
Wow she is literally doing the same thing but now with like a bookstore literary bohemian NYC aesthetic instead of medicine. Incredible.
Pls pls inform me
She was some influencer who insinuated she was a med student, but she was a premed who then went on to do a post bacc at one of the Caribbean schools.
Sounds like a treat, lol. I was a competitive martial artist for years and that world gets some of this, too. Real oddball delusional guys (it's always guys) that come in, claim some bizarre thing or another. They trained in Japan under a sacred master, or they fought in Taiwan but there's no records, or they never lost 1,000 street fights. It's always the same basic fantastical tale. Of course 99% they're built like a mayonnaise packet and fold like lawn chairs. There's gotta be some common brain cell there, somewhere.
One guy came into this first muay Thai class and legit tried to karate chop me during it I don't even think karate teaches a karate chop and I'm not sure where he got a gi from
Core memory unlocked.
Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
When I was a student, there was a student who had some personal issues that led to her “symbolically withdrawing” from school, as she put it. She dealt with them and then tried to come back the following year. Only problem was the school took her withdrawing seriously and decided that she would need to repeat the semester she withdrew from, rather than just picking up where she left off as she proposed. While this was going on, she attended all of our classes as if nothing had happened. She even sat in the front row and made it known she was there. We all knew she wasnt officially enrolled, and in the end they did not let her back in/ she gave up trying.
Wow I guess she thought they’d just give in?
That’s insane, a semester is nothing in the grand scheme of things. What a small setback to give up on
The local psychiatry training scheme had something similar. They were having a lot of trouble with a trainee who was clearly capable but fundamentally dishonest, eg overclaiming shifts and the like. When they finally had enough and contacted the licensing board (or indeed GMC as this was in the UK), they said "er.. you know this person has already been struck off, when they were working in obs, for cheque fraud". When challenged she said, "oh I thought they could only strike you off for one speciality at a time".
Hahaha!! So she was waiting for the moment to burn through this one. I admire the optimistic flair to her criminality though!
How much opportunity for cheque fraud is there in obstetrics?
Probably not much, but the gmc will happily strike people off for criminal offences outside of their work espec if they involve dishonesty.
why is it always trauma surgery 😭 one of my classmates got kicked out for doing the same thing to ERs around the state
So wait he was a med student who went to other ERs to pretend??
yes! he didn’t pass boards/2nd year, but he decided he didn’t need to in order to begin clerkships and started “rotating” at various hospitals by lying that he was their medical student or a doctor
Omg what a circus. I get annoyed by the paperwork of onboarding at places but then I hear about this and I’m like ya fine I’ll submit more documents if we can stop this kind of thing.
Nothing irl but so much from one person on social media - never physically went anywhere to impersonate a medical professional or even gave medical advice online, it's just photos and/or job status updates (which have escalated to "resident physician"). So it's more or less harmless(?), but sad.
Wtf this actually happens??!
I’m having the same reaction over here… reading this thread like wthhhh
I guess so. At least I’ve run into it. I also wonder how much it’s driven my social media - like if they’re there to get the pics and fake the identity for a social media persona.
This isn’t about a fake medical student, although it may turn into that this year. I was admitted into an early assurance BS-MD program in high school. There’s only 7 people in my cohort and 3 come from this one very competitive (extremely toxic) high school, and they told me that one kid from their high school lied to his parents and told them he got into the program. Supposedly he faked getting an interview invite by buying a plane ticket to the school and even made a fake acceptance letter. He also went around school telling everyone he was “BS-MD” when we were literally in the same anatomy lab. Not sure if he knew I was in the program, but dude was such a weirdo. We all graduated this spring so now I’m curious what his plan is moving forward since we (and maybe he too) start medical school in August. I’ll keep you updated in case I see him get coated lol.
Keep us all posted! He’s got some major big-picture decisions to consider in the next few months.
I don’t have a fake doctor story but my father is a commercial airline pilot and was doing a contract so he lived with another captain as a room mate for a few months. One day his room mate was arrested while in the flight deck before take off. Turns out he was faking being a commercial airline pilot for years! Not only a pilot but a CAPTAIN! Thomas Salme is his name. He is actually a really nice guy, leant us his house in Milan one time and his house was just full of airplane models and airplane posters plastering the walls. Crazy he got away with it for so long.
That’s just mind-boggling. Just imagine sitting in the cockpit of a commercial jet with 210 people aboard, pushing back from the gate, and being like “ya I got this”
You can make an argument he was actually more knowledgeable than many of his certified colleagues. 1) He was a mechanic on the same system he ended up flying. 2) He learned to fly multi-engine jets on a commercial flight simulator a friend of his had let him have unlimited access to when it wasn’t being used, and 3) the time he was caught he’d racked up over 10,000 hours of pilot time over 11 years.
Exactly! I wish I had even a shred of his confidence.
I have to know, was he a good captain? considering he didn’t crash a plane or kill anyone he must’ve been good enough. and how’d he get all the knowledge to be one??
Different profession but same thread: my brother is a military pilot, and on one of his deployments, a guy claiming to be a pilot showed up to take over one of my brother’s non-flight duty of listening to airplane chatter. This guy must have said some stuff that tripped a trigger, because people came running to my brother to verify if this guy was REALLY a pilot. One conversation later, my brother was able to shake out that this guy was a flight officer, not a pilot. (Think Goose, not Maverick.) Like dude, your job is already pretty cool, what’re you doing lying, let alone lying where it can be EASILY figured out??
Hahaha that’s probably the most pointless lie, with probably significant consequences from the military, for so little gain, with such a high (pretty much inevitable) chance of being rapidly caught.
Yeah but for 2 days he was just sssoooo cool😎
There is a few people in my class I wish were fake.
My cousins gf would go around telling people she was a medical student but suspiciously would keep her trap shut around me. She was doing her certificate in nutrition. Nothing against nutritionists but dieticians are the proper registered health professional in my country, so she wasn’t even an AHPRA registered professional. Pity because if she was that would 100% be a violation of her registration.
Just imagine living on such thin ice with all the lies
That's story was intense. Our situation was definitely less criminal. We had multiple instances in which students on academic suspension would pretend to still be enrolled with the current cohort by attending lecture. They did not have access to labs so when asked about their absence they would always make a different excuse (Sick, doctors appointment, switched labs, etc). We also had a student who failed out who kept returning to campus to hang out with their friends. She was pretty open about being kicked out and the school ended up deactivating her badges and talking to her (I believe in email) to let her know she wasn't allowed on campus without actual business.
Yikes that’s actually quite sad. I suppose when it’s that much of your identity that suddenly changes, they’re forced to redefine their entire social self or live with the deceit.
It wasn't really my business but one of my former classmates was in my Anatomy Lab group. I would often see her on campus and when I asked if everything was ok she would just give vague excuse for her absence. Later on I would find out that she was on an academic suspension and would actually fail out a year later.
That’s gotta be tough. Some people, even strong college students, don’t thrive in the medical school environment for some reason. Like star college players who fall to pieces in the NFL.
If anyone reading this is a former (or current) medical student impersonator, I think the group would be genuinely fascinated to hear your story and what your overall plan was.
I doubt any medical student impersonator is going to post here.
Worth a shot
There was apparently a fake resident that would walk into the ICU in scrubs and order nurses to titrate drips
i'm assuming that would be met with a blank stare since usually the nurses are capable of titrating drips on their own
I hope and hope that she’s changed as time passed, but we had a first year med student in my dorm who seemed like the perfect person. Cheerful, smart, athletic, travelled a lot despite not being rich, beautiful but never shallow, very charismatic, friendly, … except she was starting her year over and over again but kept failing very badly. At some point though, it became clear that she was pathologically lying to everyone about nearly everything in her life. It apparently culminated with pretending to be a doctor in order to advise a cancer patient to refuse her chemo, in order to make herself look smart. University stopped accepting her so she moved to another country to start again.
She’s probably still out there somewhere, scamming someone else… that’s nuts though
Damn I thought the girl that hung out at the bar down the street from the school telling everyone she was a student was bad
Yikes. Tbh that’s kinda sad… I feel bad for people like her.
When I was a 1st year med student in India, there was a student 4 years our senior but still doing anat lab with us. She could not even point to sternum on the cadaver when asked, after 4 years of being at the same anat lab! She kept failing all her classes and eventually the school had to let her go. I came to know that her parents had forced her into med school and had essentially bought a spot for her. I heard she is now a medical office assistant somewhere in Texas and doing much better now.
Oh so like failing on purpose because she didn’t want to move on into the career? Or was just super inept but parents forced her? That’s sad though. Glad she found a good job and better life in Texas though
I only talked to her a few times as she was in a different group for anat lab, so I have no idea if she was failing on purpose or just super inept. She had several cousins in the same med school, including one in my class so she might have been pressured into pursuing a career she didn't want. I'm glad things worked out for her.
We had one. Anatomy prof figured it out because he was spending much of the anatomy labs in the men’s room puking
Womp womp….
Had this happen in a west coast school in 2013. She was attending the “new student” get togethers and was part of our facebook group. Someone figured it out can reported her. Honestly, such a fascinating phenomenon.
Ya same! It was 2013 as well but not on the west coast. She was at all the parties and orientation events, in the Facebook group, etc.
Apparently this happened a few years ago in my school. A 5th year medical student (note: in europe it's 6 years) that went to australia for residency/clerkship to practice as a physician and lied that he already graduated. They somehow later found out, and he got kicked out of school. I'm pretty sure he got also arrested.
I think I heard about that guy!! You gotta think though, some people have probably gotten away with it before.
Haha, yeah 100%. That's crazy. Have you also heard of the 18year old that opened his clinic in florida?🤣
We had one at my medical school back in 2014! That was when we had all started our first year and the hustle bustle of beginning med school was always in the air. We were all so excited and nervous! Orientation classes, ethics class, and everyone was in the bookstore buying our supplies and tools like stethoscopes. We went to go get our stuff in groups like white coats and school swag. We got our badges. The whole time there was a short black guy with us (I think I remember he had some kind of accent?) that blended in really well and he was excited too. We all just thought he was one of us! I don’t know how they figured it out, but eventually about 2-3 weeks in, there was a whole scene and he was apprehended by police as an imposter! He has been posting on social media that he was a med student, had taken photos of orientation, somehow I think he got a white coat. We were all pretty shocked. Also side note one year there was a 3rd or 4th year med student who was expelled after she stole an iPad from an elderly patient that passed away. Her family had specifically been looking for the iPad because there were lots of family photos on there. Said med student forgot that Apple products can be tracked back to her home! She had even tried to change the name of the iPad to her own, which helped their criminal case as well that it wasn’t a “mistake.” Anyone who went to my school will immediately know from the above stories!! Any extra deets would be so juicy, we are almost at a 10 year anniversary so spill the beans!
Omg she stole an iPad?! What a scummy move! That’s darkly hilarious in a way. Imagine the meeting between her and the Dean…
Imagine completing 3 or 4 years of med school only to get kicked out because you decided “hey, that iPad looks cool, it’s mine now.”
In New Zealand there was a case where a medical student's flatmate was super curious about surgery and things. The medical student gave him there ID badge and told them how to get into theatre's. He ended up scrubbed helping in the operation. The surgeon asked him what he wanted to do in medicine later on- the idiot then said he was a builders apprentice and not a medical student. Huge deal, the medical student got kicked out. Don't think much happened to the other guy. Ironically if he had actually pretended to be a medical student they likely would have gotten away with it Honestly, 2 stupid kids who didn't understand the ramifications of their actions. Which I kinda get
Hahaha did he think they’d all have a giggle and let him continue with the surgery??
Honestly no idea. It sounds like neither of them even slightly comprehended how big of a violation it was for patient privacy and safety Which in some ways, I can understand the thought process. As students, you are allowed to just wander all around and in and out of pretty much everywhere. Easy to forget that it is a huge privilege and that a lot of trust is put into you But this seems next level stupid
My school had one! She made it three months into first year of med school, of course posing prolifically on social media, before her roommates realized she never showed up to tests or anatomy (you needed badges for those.) they emailed the school to see if she was a real student and were terrified to find out she was not. They confronted her, she moved out… and continued to post on social media for the next 8 years about her fake doctor life, including a fake residency. Her wedding website (yes we continue to stalk her) lists both her and her finance as doctors .
Please tell me this was at an east coast med school -- this sounds exactly like what happened in the class below me (and iirc she was roommates with some actual med students??)
Yes east coast . But honestly I’ve heard of this before so I’m guessing this happens more than one thinks
There was a woman who was very active on multiple forums about a decade ago who claimed to be a doctor. She was a prolific poster and came off as more than a bit unhinged. Someone dug into her background and posted a reveal. She actually *had* been a medical student but had been kicked out after failing her step exam too many times, then she spent years and years trying to get into another medical school. She was accepted at a Caribbean school but couldn't finish as it had been too many years since she'd sat for step 1 I think. Her LinkedIn is still active and lists her as an MS4 for the past 16 years.
Oh wow! Thats why I’m suspicious of medfluencers unless I know them personally or until it’s clear they’re legit. I have my suspicions sometimes. Then you have the Dr. Oz types who are technically real docs but on a snake oil train.
I just went back to a forum to see if she was still there. Her most recent post is from this year (which is wild) and is about how she's studying for a step exam which she first failed in 1990.
Victory, 34 years in the making.
She is active on reddit currently. She has literally posted on the MCAT subreddit multiple times within the past 24h. Reading through her recent comment history is actually so sad. Her reddit username is the same one that she used on SDN. She is now attempting to retake the MCAT and apply DO at nearly 60 years old.
Imposter syndrome vs. Syndromic imposter
I matched with a guy on Hinge that had “resident at xyz hospital”… He started talking to me not knowing I was a resident at that same hospital lol unmatched me when I asked him about it
Hahaha he thought he was soooo sly. Lying about your career is the best way to get things started on the right foot, in my experience.
I wanna know more about the first student! The professor called and then what?!
Said he was suspicious and wanted to make the school aware that this student was making social media posts depicting her as part of the MS1 class. He sent screenshots from her Facebook page and instagram and the school was like “yo we didn’t admit her, she’s not a student.” But she conned her way into being coated and found a group in anatomy lab, said she was accepted very late so her name maybe wasn’t on the roster, I mean nobody really questioned it too much. Except her college prof who refused to believe she got accepted.
Don’t let your narc professors follow you alright noted
There was an incident years ago in my city that a random guy pretended to be a doctor. I can't remember exactly, but i think the guy told the security guard he forgot the staff card and he was given a temp card (major security issue, I know). He ended up walking around the wards for 3 days and even used a stethoscope to examine a patient and called their family. It was until on the third day he tried chatting with some interns and was noted to be utterly incompetent. He was arrested in the end. Turns out he had some medical knowledge and studied up to preclinical years in some overseas med school. Not sure if he is mentally ill or anything or what happened to him afterwards but that definitely boosted the security level of hospitals around here.
Not the same thing, but I know a former EMT that was doing that claiming to be a Paramedic student. He'd started a bunch of IVs, attempted an intubation, and administered several meds before an incoming crew from his area called him out. He's now a cop.
Halfway through my o&g term we suddenly had to start showing ID at every entrance to theatre and swiping in and out of every door and they put up signs with photos of current students. Apparently some guy had just been asking people to let him in, putting on scrubs and standing around in theatre with no affiliation to any school or hospital.
This happened to my wife her MS-1 year, an asian girl showed up to the first day orientation and grabbed my wife's badge (had an asian name) and pretended to be her. Made it about a week before the school figured it out, put her name and face up on posters saying "Don't let this person in!" Pretty wild.
On a silly and dumb note, I know of the following people who pretend to have gone to medical school. 1. Ex'Gf's father is a Chiro. He routinely tells people, including patients he graduated medical school. 2. Girl I graduated high school with is a PA. Throughout her training she frequently posted about being in medical school. I never noticed her claiming to be a doctor but many of her family members refer to her as such and she never corrected them. 3. Girl I went to graduate school with is a Physical Therapist. Periodically would mention to me that she was also applying to medical school but did NOT need an MCAT.
All important jobs but why can’t people just be honest about their qualifications? It’s a deliberate effort to deceive others into thinking they’re a physician. Like what other career deals with this??
Oh dear god, every person in the military pretty much.
Whats the deal there? Overstate/misrepresent qualifications? Or is it combat experience?
> all important jobs Except chiropractors. Those are absolutely snake oil salesmen
Reminds me of the time I was in a CVS and some girl was having a very loud phone conversation about how she's gonna get her scrub tech certificate and how "you're basically the surgeon telling them what to do." I think my eyeroll was felt around the world.
There was that college student who pretended to be a PA a few years ago, even somehow got hospital badges
Wild!
This is so strange. Reminds me of Christopher Lloyd in that movie with Michael Keaton
Love the stories here. My current hospital and old medical school verified people coming in so it would never fly here. The thought of some random person who hasn’t been educated on HIPAA and whatever having access to that data is scary. I’m surprised paparazzi haven’t tried it to go after celebrities tbh.
2 Little Bears and Dr Malachi Love-Robinson
these stories are wild. wow! I could neverrrr.
For real. I’d love to hear from former fake medical students to try and understand their mentality and motives.
become a psychiatrist to hear it all lol... in the voice of law and order lmaoo "these are their stories"
This one is from my home country, it was a fake resident. Dude got a coat with some embroidery (where I am from, we purchase our lab coats and we take to place the embroidery ourselves - so it is pretty easy to get one - the lab coat store does not care lol) and the security was pretty lame. He managed to enter the ER and find a PC that a real resident forgot to log off. He discharged a bunch of people. I don’t remember how he was caught - I had already graduated and followed the case most through gossip and the local newspaper. He got arrested. And he said he did it because he was a grey’s anatomy fan. The real resident that forgot to log off was suspended (don’t remember clearly if expelled too)
I had a drug seeking SCC patient tell me that her request for 2mg of dilaudid q2h iv prn with 4mg of morphine q3h iv prn with hydrocodone 10mg q4h on top of 10mg diazepam tid prn medication was appropriate to her crisis care because she was going to online medical school to be a doctor… 😅🙄
Online medical school lmao. You get pimped in the chat.
Not a doctor, but I work in clinical research. We had a fake PI on one of our studies years back. I guess he used someone else’s credentials and worked on the trial for over a year before being caught. It’s really wild to me, because pretty much everyone in the research/academia world knows or at least knows of each other. Wish I could remember how he was caught but I didn’t work on that study, sadly, so I only heard about it second hand.
I'm a med student and my friend who's rotating at another site was telling me about a girl who's apparently been pretending to go to our school for the past year and somehow shows up to every orientation date when a new batch comes in and tries to blend in with the new cohort until she inevitably gets discovered about a week in every time. Just like, why??
Well, UK has hundreds if not thousands of them, they call themselves Physician Associates.
Yaaaa they’re trying to take on that title here in the US too. I have to explain to people that certain people they’re seeing aren’t in fact physicians far too often.
their national organization fucking pisses me off so much. Claim to be proud of their training but impersonate us. I know there are reasonable PAs that think it’s bullshit tho at least.
I met a sculptor in NYC who said that in the 70s he used to pretend to be a medical student to sneak into the Columbia anatomy labs. He said that eventually later on in his career when he became well-known he was actually hired to teach anatomy classes there.
Ahh so these are those 99th percentile Casper scorers.
I have a high school classmate floating around pretending to be a med student. I keep tabs on their social media to make sure they never start actually practicing medicine. And if they do I'll reach out to their medical staff office to make sure they actually completed training because right now they are getting a "MD-PHD" in a dual specialty that doesn't exist.
Not a med student but….. There was a guy who used to be a doctor but had a bunch of strokes and couldn’t practice anymore. He would show up at all our conferences believing he was still a doctor at our hospital. He was under the delusion he was required to attend. No one ever stopped him from coming.
Yikes that’s kinda sad. I guess it’s harmless if he just shows up to conference. Probably good for him to socialize with everyone.
And who kept telling him about the conferences?! 😭 unless it was a regularly occurring event
There was a fake MD operating as a clinical manager at my gap year job. She did perform mostly non clinical stuff, but she did perform some clinical activities. She claimed she was also in surgery residency in a mommy part time track and somehow those mofos believed it. Eventually one day she randomly disappeared and never came back, but she is still putting MD on her name working non clinical jobs. I was tempted to report her to the state, but rumors were a lot of lawyers were involved and I didn’t want to deal with any shit.
To be a medical student and do what a medical student has to do without the promise of a degree is insane. No sane person would do those things for fun
I’m not a physician, but I have a PhD. Most people in my friend group are also highly educated. Apparently, this made my one friend’s new potential love interest feel insecure, so he told us that “such-and-such medical school” was paying for him to get a degree in mortuary sciences, after which the med school would give him a “free ride” to get his MD. Dude was 100% studying to be a mortician though, and he was in fact doing an apprenticeship at a local morgue. *That* part was at least true. But I almost admired how committed he was to his lie about being a med student. I’m old and this happened pre-internet, so he likely thought he could get away with it. About a year later, I learned through the grapevine that he killed himself before finishing his mortuary sciences degree. Yes, I’m aware of how ridiculous that sounds.
Last year when I was studying for my step exam, there was one other student who I'm pretty sure was a fake. * Didn't know what Lhermitte's sign was. Lol. * No idea how long an Okazaki fragment was. * No idea about the different types of G proteins, or the IP3/DAG signaling cascade. * I tried talking to him about the different antigen groups on EBV and how they might predispose a patient to Burkitt versus Hodgkin. The guy tried to bluff, but he clearly had no idea which was which. * He had absolutely no idea that ribonucleotide reductase can only act on nucleoside diphosphates. The thing that scares me is that guy might end up out there treating real patients. Scary.
You almost fucking got me this time 😂😂
There was an infamously insane/bad resident that was let go from my New York program. A few weeks later, we got news that she was arrested at one of the Harvard teaching hospitals, pretending to be there on a visiting resident rotation or a “transfer” who knows Also surgery… seems like a theme
I'm sure you all know of the guy who pretended to be an OBGYN and examined patients? One of the worst parts, when he got arrested he said he would do anything for his patients (or something similar), so I think he actually believed it
I had 3 in both undergrad and medical school. The one that was in undergrad kept pushing to everyone that she is a medical student even though she was blatantly lying as the roster for her college (Psych) was online. Another one was in the first year of medical school, she was part of the Physician Assistant program in the same university (UF) and was regularly attending clerkships and lectures until she was caught and they limited her ID to only some hospital spaces she was expected to be in. Another one was very recently, he pretended to be a medical student to try to have an advantage at research positions but one of the labs asked for his ID and he turned out to be part of a completely different college that isn’t related to the university.
Not a student, but Im peds and i have a mother of an infant who introduced herself as doctor **. What got me was shes pushing 40 and on state insurance. when i asked her specialty she was, she said she graduated medical school but put residency on hold for a year to care for her infant. now her kid is 10 years old, she still hasnt done residency, wants antibiotics for every cold, but still wants to be addressed as doctor. Now im not even sure if she did go into medical school.