Eleni Linos , associate professor 1 , Natnaelle Admassu , medical student 2 , Hala Sabry-Elnaggar , emergency medicine physician 3 , Peter MMC Li , otolaryngology head and neck surgeon 4 , Esther Choo , associate professor 5 1Program for Clinical Research, Department of Dermatology, University of California San Francisco, CA 94143 0808, USA 2UC Berkeley-UC San Francisco Joint Medical Program, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA 3Physician Moms Group 4Department of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery, Stanford Medicine, CA, USA 5Center for Policy and Research in Emergency Medicine, Department of Emergency Medicine, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR Correspondence to: eleni.linos{at}ucsf.edu

Linos and colleagues present a compilation of embarrassing doctor fails—from inappropriate I love yous to forgetting how a phone works

As doctors have become more comfortable and active on social media, they have started to share stories about personal experiences. This has led to posts of unexpected hilarity. A recent post on Physician Moms Group (https://mypmg.com/), a large online forum for practising doctors who are also mothers,1 related a deeply embarrassing moment (fig 1).

Fig 1 Doctor fail posted on Physician Moms Group

Within hours, the post had received over 2200 likes and 235 responses, including several suggestions of ways the original poster could have quickly recovered from this situation (for example, using Adele’s song lyrics) and an outpouring of others’ embarrassing work related blunders.

From this and similar posts by doctors on Facebook and Twitter, we gathered several key examples of physician “fails.”