Expelled from medical school

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.
Panda Bear said:
I don't understand what the offense was here. The patient write-up is not a peer-reviewed paper, a dissertation, or anything like that. If the information from Harrison's describes the patient and clarifies the diagnosis for anybody reading the case-summary what's the problem?
Perhaps he should've cited the reference.

Members don't see this ad.
 
Panda Bear said:
Lingering during the bimanual exam and when the patient asks you what you are doing saying, "Quiet lady, I'm looking for the dead fish."

Falling asleep during surgery and falling into the sterile field. (Well, maybe you won't get expelled but you'll never live it down.)

When your attending makes you scrub for five minutes scornfully asking him if he really believes in that as-yet unproven "germ theory" of disease.

Telling a schizophrenic patient that he needs to take his meds because, "I'm the Devil and I'll rot your guts if you don't."

Thank you for the laugh...needed that.
My favorite story, though not an expelling fault, was one I heard at Duke. A student in his surgical rotation was asked to put a foley in an unconscious patient. He appaerntly opened the tray, set up the cath, surgilube and everything. Then he asked what to do with the betadyne (sic). The intern told him to squiirt it on the (cotton) balls and clean the area. Yes, you guess it...I cracked up when I heard this, but funny that the other students did not seem to find it humorous. Oh well
 
A professor of mine told me that the U-Virginia managed to catch hundreds of people for cheating (they are EXTREMELY strict on matters of cheating) on a paper. The professor had all the assignments for over a decade on file and suspected people were cheating. He wrote a program to compare all of the papers, and many were too similar. Turns out that a fraternity had kept sample papers on file for years, and many people were copying them. All the current students were expelled, obviously.

Now, according to him, other alumni cheaters had their degrees rescinded, and in turn, some lawyers and doctors lost their licenses. Not sure if that's true, but my prof swore it was.


One female med student was in serious hot water for performing a circumcision on a cadaver. I hardly think that that's a major offense, but apparently some people do. Removing people's major organs is okay, but a foreskin isn't?
 
Members don't see this ad :)
2 years ago, at the UIC Pharmacy school, 2 students were expelled for stealing chemicals that are commonly used in homemade explosives and were hiding it in their personal lockers. With them being south-asian/middle eastern and the whole 9/11 tragedy, the FBI was all over this and it brought a lot of negative media attention to UIC.
 
Discobolus said:
Maybe that is why the standardized patient that taught me breast and pelvic exams kept on correcting me to say "everything looks normal" instead of "everything looks really good" followed by a thumbs up! 😀 😀 😀

:laugh:
 
My roommate my sophomore year was a M1 at U Mich Med.
He told me about this guy from Yale in his M1 class whose dad was a big shot at Yale Med. This Yale-alum M1 was an ex-football player and I guess a royal horse's ass. Nobody in his class liked him.
Apparently this guy dettached a cadaver's penis and placed it in the pocket of a fellow anatomy student as a twisted joke.
His dad tried to pull a few strings but BAM! U Mich said C-ya.
My roomie was overjoyed.
 
Panda Bear said:
I don't understand what the offense was here. The patient write-up is not a peer-reviewed paper, a dissertation, or anything like that. If the information from Harrison's describes the patient and clarifies the diagnosis for anybody reading the case-summary what's the problem?

You ARE joking, right? (I can be slow sometimes...)
 
Runtita said:
You ARE joking, right? (I can be slow sometimes...)


Well, no. It is my understanding that the patient write-up is something, at least in our school, that goes on the chart and serves to describe the patient to anybody else reading it. Sort of a patient summary. In psychiatry I have seen them six or seven pages long. I don't see how copying relevant sections of the DSM-IV, for example, would be innappropriate even if it wasn't referenced. It's not as if you're "taking credit" for somebody else's work. There's no grade and the only reason your name is on it is so people know who to contact or who to sue.

It's like when I write a prescription. Sometimes I copy it straight out of Epocrates but I don't put a footnote on the prescription pad. If I copied a section of the DSM-IV on the patient summary it would probably be pretty obvious what it was and that I wasn't the original author. Maybe I would preface it with, "according to the DSM-IV."
 
A few years back a guy at Baylor with a history of behavioral problems got expelled for putting on a porn tape on the closed circuit TV system in the Labor and Delivery ward during his OBGYN rotation. As you can imagine, the new mothers, as well as the faculty, were not amused. He got the boot. This info was from a friend of a friend, but I believe it to be true.

On a more somber note, a classmate of mine just got the boot this week for cheating on the boards last week. He was top ten in the class, and an all around good guy. It makes me wonder why some people do what they do.
 
Plinko said:
On a more somber note, a classmate of mine just got the boot this week for cheating on the boards last week. He was top ten in the class, and an all around good guy. It makes me wonder why some people do what they do.

Damn! Who could possibly get away with cheating on the boards?! They have camera and audio surveillance up the wazoo in there. Literally! I think they have crotch cams... 😱 🙄 😀

But Seriously. The surveillance at my local testing center puts homeland security to shame (albeit that is not that difficult, but still...). :laugh:
 
When I was at Dartmouth for a residency interview, the chief resident told us a story about a female student on call who had her boyfriend and another male bring drugs to the hospital for the three of them to use in the on-call room. Apparently, when the couple awoke the next morning they found the other guy dead from an overdose. They placed him in a wheelchair, wheeled him out of the hospital, drove to another hospital, and dropped him off. After all of this was discovered she was kicked out.
 
TheProwler said:
A professor of mine told me that the U-Virginia managed to catch hundreds of people for cheating (they are EXTREMELY strict on matters of cheating) on a paper. The professor had all the assignments for over a decade on file and suspected people were cheating. He wrote a program to compare all of the papers, and many were too similar. Turns out that a fraternity had kept sample papers on file for years, and many people were copying them. All the current students were expelled, obviously.

About 200 students at Simon Fraser University in my neck of the woods were caught cheating on an essay. The profs use a program on TurnItIn.com which references any submitted essay to an enormously large pool of previous essays, encyclopedias, textbooks, web sites, etc...My own university will usually suspend for plagiarism followed by an expulsion.
 
stwei said:
What would be the most stupid thing a medical student could do to get him/herself expelled from school? Plagiarism? Patient complaints?

Running a Meth Lab. Just ask UTHSCSA, I'm not joking.
 
Members don't see this ad :)
I wonder how many students of these students committed suicide as a result of being expelled from medical school?

I would expect a decent #...
 
Resurrection ..I heard of a guy that broke into a house while drunk because he thought that it was his and he beat up the elderly occupants whom he thought were intruders. He was an MD/PhD but the PhD program let him stay.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using SDN Mobile
 
These stories are pretty outstanding. Thanks for bumping it. Of the 180 or so people that started medical school with me, none of them were expelled, including the person who was caught cheating on exams and had a substance abuse problem. She went through remediation, as did many others, but no one was kicked out.
 
I wonder how many students of these students committed suicide as a result of being expelled from medical school?

I would expect a decent #...

I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't higher or was actually lower than actual physician suicides - which itself is pretty high.

I hear stories of people who suffer extremely ridiculous hardship, losses, or bad luck are still able to find happiness. Well, there was a TED talk on it anyways, about artificial happiness.
 
Just so you guys know, the person who guns another classmate to get them expelled for any reason will have a rep that quickly catches up with them. Then the real fun begins. When an OR consistently looses needles when a med student/resident is there, then they find them in her scrubs later, they could also get in a lot of trouble. Four bottles of 2% lido disappear for every lac you sew, that could bring up questions. A six pack of Jevity per day is missing from the ICU pantry, then found in your locker...You guys get the idea.
Residents have Karma on speed dial.
 
Just so you guys know, the person who guns another classmate to get them expelled for any reason will have a rep that quickly catches up with them. Then the real fun begins. When an OR consistently looses needles when a med student/resident is there, then they find them in her scrubs later, they could also get in a lot of trouble. Four bottles of 2% lido disappear for every lac you sew, that could bring up questions. A six pack of Jevity per day is missing from the ICU pantry, then found in your locker...You guys get the idea.
Residents have Karma on speed dial.

People use lido recreationally?
 
Some guys in my med school class were planning to take the cadavers out of the room and pay homeless people to lie in the cadaver tanks and scare students.

It never came to fruition, but I bet that would result in an expulsion.
 
People use lido recreationally?

I think he's just saying student A guns student B by stealing and hiding the lido used for his lacerations to make it look like he lost them, then they're later found in student A's possession.
 
I think he's just saying student A guns student B by stealing and hiding the lido used for his lacerations to make it look like he lost them, then they're later found in student A's possession.
Kind of. Residents who find out one of their students/interns got someone expelled have hundreds of methods of exacting revenge on that person; many involving framing of gross negligence or theft. Seriously, loosing even one "needle down" after a surgery can be terminable offense for members of staff. If it looks like someone was collecting them to mess with the surgeon and force them to do tons of imaging studies and open the patient back up to try and find it, he will have a hard time ever getting a medical license.
Finding a bottle of Avaguard hidden away in a student's locker...he'll be waiting tables again while he waits for charges to be pressed.
You get the point.

THEY CAN ALWAYS HURT YOU MORE!
 
Kind of. Residents who find out one of their students/interns got someone expelled have hundreds of methods of exacting revenge on that person; many involving framing of gross negligence or theft. Seriously, loosing even one "needle down" after a surgery can be terminable offense for members of staff. If it looks like someone was collecting them to mess with the surgeon and force them to do tons of imaging studies and open the patient back up to try and find it, he will have a hard time ever getting a medical license.
Finding a bottle of Avaguard hidden away in a student's locker...he'll be waiting tables again while he waits for charges to be pressed.
You get the point.

THEY CAN ALWAYS HURT YOU MORE!

1 bottle of Avagard? Why?
 
Finding a bottle of Avaguard hidden away in a student's locker...he'll be waiting tables again while he waits for charges to be pressed.
You get the point.

Career ended for a missing vial of lidocaine? "Loosing" a license for one lost needle? Pressing charges for a bottle of Avaguard?

No, I don't get your point.
 
Career ended for a missing vial of lidocaine? "Loosing" a license for one lost needle? Pressing charges for a bottle of Avaguard?

No, I don't get your point.

Agreed.
 
Some guys in my med school class were planning to take the cadavers out of the room and pay homeless people to lie in the cadaver tanks and scare students.

It never came to fruition, but I bet that would result in an expulsion.

Paging Dr. Ashton Kutcher, Dr. Kutcher to the gross lab.
 
This really does depend on your school. I was recently told about a DO school where the dean was giving an OMM lecture, asked for a student volunteer, then when the (male) student removed his shirt one of his friends whistled at him. That resulted in a suspension. Do the same thing at another school, the dean might laugh.

All that said, please people, use common sense, and don't disrespect the cadavers. These were once living, breathing people that have families. They donated their bodies so that you can benefit and meaningfully contribute to this world as a physician. Recognize that gift and don't mock or disgrace them.
 
A case of 3M Avagard Surgical & Healthcare Personnel is almost $700 if you don't order a bunch at a time. They're perfect for hiding in a bunch of places.

http://www.heritagesupply.com/Soaps...sonnel_Hand_Antiseptic_with_Moisturizers.html

Loosing even one needle requires keeping the patient under anesthesia until you find it, which is dangerous. Everything else in the OR stops if they're missing a needle. Ask someone that's done a surgery rotation about it if you're still not sure. Once the surgeon says "needle down" a whole sequence of events must happen perfectly and someone that consistently screws up this process will get sent home, probably for good.

Theft of any kind will get you kicked off a rotation and someone that got another future doctor expelled, things could, conveniently, end up in your pocket or locker and the PD could think it was you because you've been set up.

I wouldn't worry about this kind of stuff unless you killed someone else's career in medicine and word spreads of it.
 
Last edited:
I have a very mundane example of a medical student expulsion for this highly entertaining thread: a girl was kicked out for stealing her roommate's credit cards.
Bottom line: just try being a decent human being and not an idiot.
 
I have a very mundane example of a medical student expulsion for this highly entertaining thread: a girl was kicked out for stealing her roommate's credit cards.
Bottom line: just try being a decent human being and not an idiot.
Was it really necessary to bump up a thread started in 2004?
 
Lingering during the bimanual exam and when the patient asks you what you are doing saying, "Quiet lady, I'm looking for the dead fish."

Falling asleep during surgery and falling into the sterile field. (Well, maybe you won't get expelled but you'll never live it down.)

When your attending makes you scrub for five minutes scornfully asking him if he really believes in that as-yet unproven "germ theory" of disease.

Telling a schizophrenic patient that he needs to take his meds because, "I'm the Devil and I'll rot your guts if you don't."
I miss Panda Bear... I wonder whatever happened to him.
 
Some guys in my med school class were planning to take the cadavers out of the room and pay homeless people to lie in the cadaver tanks and scare students.

It never came to fruition, but I bet that would result in an expulsion.

This would actually be pretty funny.

I miss Panda Bear... I wonder whatever happened to him.

Hahaha telling a schizo pt you're the devil....Same.
 
Was it really necessary to bump up a thread started in 2004?
Well, before me it was bumped up in August 2013, so my necrobump is not that bad actually. And it's a pretty interesting thread, why not bump it up for the new crop of allo members?

I don't always understand necrobump complaints. I mean, it's one thing if one necrobumps by asking a question to someone who probably hasn't been to SDN in 5 years, but it's different when an interesting thread is bumped up with a relevant piece of information.
 
Well, before me it was bumped up in August 2013, so my necrobump is not that bad actually. And it's a pretty interesting thread, why not bump it up for the new crop of allo members?

I don't always understand necrobump complaints. I mean, it's one thing if one necrobumps by asking a question to someone who probably hasn't been to SDN in 5 years, but it's different when an interesting thread is bumped up with a relevant piece of information.
I once got a warning for necrobumping. I also don't understand the issue. Close everything before a certain year if it isn't supposed to be necrobumped!
 
I heard of a student lying on his ERAS application and getting called out on it. Sounds like he was going to just get a slap on the wrist and be forced to withdraw from the match, but then residencies starting calling in with concerns about the truthfulness so they expelled him.
 
I miss Panda Bear... I wonder whatever happened to him.

The end to his story is rather dark, actually. He got divorced and hates his job. It's depressing.
 
I love this thread… I don't know any crazy stories about medical students getting expelled from school. However, in undergrad there was a guy a couple years above me who was a student ambassador (took prospective high school students + their parents on tour and whatnot) who had a pretty epic expelling (sp?). So I went to a small state school and so we only have one show room. Anyways, this guy got hammered on Thursday night and had one of the keys to this room in his pocket, ended up taking a girl back to this show room and you can imagine what happened from there.. Anyway, the next morning another ambassador was giving a tour to a girl plus her parents and ended up walking in on these two butt naked lying on the bed. No covers, nothing.

Needless to say, I don't think that girl ended up coming to my school……
 
We were warned that taking gold teeth from cadavers in anatomy lab would result in an immediate expulsion. Not sure if it was ever done before, but they made a specific point of saying it was absolutely not acceptable. Unfortunately, I am sure such a warning is necessary for some people........
 
We were warned that taking gold teeth from cadavers in anatomy lab would result in an immediate expulsion. Not sure if it was ever done before, but they made a specific point of saying it was absolutely not acceptable. Unfortunately, I am sure such a warning is necessary for some people........

Makes you wonder why they had to implement that rule in the first place.
 
What would be the most stupid thing a medical student could do to get him/herself expelled from school? Plagiarism? Patient complaints?
There was a guy who got expelled from med school back in the late 70s for swiping gold fillings from cadavers. I think he went to podiatry. (edit-didn't see the earlier post) Another expulsion was one of the guys got popped for chugging Brompton's Cocktail in 3rd year IM clerkship . . . one time too many. He disappeared.
 
Last edited:
Top