Comically Inept Healing

This is why you don’t get your medical license off the back of a cereal box.

"HMOs: We like saving lives, but we don't get all freaky about it!"

— Christopher Titus, Titus

The human body is a delicate thing, and when a person is injured or sick it's vital to give them proper care to aid healing. Or, you could just stick some leeches on their arm and hope for the best.

This trope occurs when someone attempts to perform medicine despite not having the faintest idea what they're doing, and only succeeds in making things worse. They often have rather... creative ideas about what constitutes medical aid. If you find yourself in the care of one of these people, run away quickly and don't look back.

Common traits of these include using amputation for every malady, diagnosing mild illnesses as ridiculously lethal ones, using implements that obviously aren't medically safe (i.e. using a kitchen knife instead of a scalpel), or making use of obviously quack or seriously outdated methods. Quite frequently, if the erstwhile doctor doesn't simply kill their patient, they can manage medically impossible tasks solely through Achievements in Ignorance, like replacing someone's organs with objects in the vicinity or sewing functioning limbs on backwards.

Need not be performed by an actual doctor: any obviously terrible attempt at healing counts.

Compare:

• Anatomically Ignorant Healing: The doctor doesn't know anything about the species they're treating.
• Back-Alley Doctor: An unlicensed doctor, competent or not.
• Harmful Healing: Any medical procedure with horrific consequences.
• Mad Doctor: A Mad Scientist who experiments with humans.
• Meatgrinder Surgery: Crude surgery performed with whatever implements are at hand yet are still successful.
• Nurse with Good Intentions: Someone tries to care for their sick or injured friend, but causes more problems than success.
• Roadside Surgery: Crude surgery performed in the immediate non-OR vicinity by necessity.
• We Have to Get the Bullet Out!: No, you don't. Seriously, don't try it.
• Worst Aid: Medicine which works in media but wouldn't in real life.

May overlap with Snake Oil Salesman, Phony Degree and I Have No Idea What I'm Doing.

---

Examples

Advertising

• A commercial for Sling TV has a woman who watches medical dramas assisting an elderly woman who just collapsed. According to the younger woman, "Her kidneys are still beating", thus failing med school forever.

Anime and Manga

• Frame Arms Girls: Ao gets a cold in episode 9, and the FA Girls try to gather materials to cure her illness. What they return with is a giant pile of useless items that includes live chickens, potted cacti, and an excess number of charms all for various folk remedies. Their attempt at cooking a soup ends up creating purple smoke that forces Ao to open a window, so the FA Girls simply shove a bunch of herbs and a hard drive with an antivirus software into her mouth before Ao simply faints.
• Gamaran: While returning from his battle against the Tengen Ryuu Gama notices the gravity of the wound inflicted on his left arm and wonders if he can heal it with his saliva and proceeds to lick the wound. At this point Shimon Kudo steps him by telling him that he should visit a doctor instead.
• One Piece
  • Dr. Hirluk is a well-intentioned quack who tries to heal people with frog livers.
  • When Nami is sick, Luffy suggests giving her all of the medicine they have to heal her.
  • Luffy also tries to help Zoro heal by pouring booze on his face, the idea being that Zoro likes booze and therefore can heal from it.
  • When Zoro's fighting the Humandrills, one of them gets slashed across the chest and tries to treat the wound by putting spittle over it. Even Zoro points out how useless this is.
  • Brook, being a skeleton, is under the impression that drinking milk makes him instantly healthy. At first there's no reason to disbelieve him since One Piece is full of crazy nonsense like that, but he's pretty clearly still in pain afterwards despite what he tells himself.
• Sailor Moon R episode 78 is focused on this trope. Minako is the only Senshi that avoids the flu it seems, so she goes to the other girls to help them. The trope is most significant when she visits Rei. She feeds her rice porridge with way too much salt, then spilled it on her, blasted her with unintentionally loud music and finally blows the boom box trying to stop it. This earned her a loud Get Out!. But at the end, karma bites back. Minako does get sick and now has to endure Usagi's turn at this trope.
• Subverted in Toriko: Saiseiya Yosaku use his own spittle to close wounds and even reattach lost limbs... and it actually works!
• Arcueid does this to herself in the Tsukihime manga. Since she didn't finish regenerating after Shiki cut her to pieces, she closed her wounds with packing tape and staples. Since her pain threshold is so high, she didn't even notice any real difference until Shiki cleaned her and patched her up with actual medical supplies.

Comic Books

• Asterix in Switzerland: Varius Flavus, the utterly corrupt Roman governor of Condatum (now Rennes), needs to get rid of a Quaestor (inspector) he poisoned, so he summons the doctors of the local garrison, whom he claims are "more murderous than a legion armed to the teeth" when united. When the doctors are first removed from their drunken orgy, they waste time arguing about who's the best suited for the operation, then suggest multiple contradictory and potentially fatal treatments (one of which has "if the patient survives..." in the middle). Thankfully, the Quaestor is brought to the Gaulish village and "kept hostage" by the Gauls until Asterix and Obelix return with the cure.
  • A similar situation happens in Asterix and the Magic Carpet, where a group of the Rajah's doctors get together to cure Cacofonix, who's lost his voice (which would in any other story be a blessing, but in this case they need him to sing). Their suggestions range from ineptly well-meaning to outright fatal (such as cutting his throat), before settling on soaking him overnight in a mix of elephant milk, stool and hair. It does nothing to cure him. Near the end, Asterix gives him some of the magic potion so he can help fight off the villains, and it clears up his voice right away.
• The Superior Foes of Spider-Man: When Speed Demon injured his left leg right before an upcoming heist, the rest of the gang's idea of medically treating him so he can still participate is strapping his cast-covered leg into a rollerskate, shoving him in the general direction of the enemy, and hoping for the best.

Comic Strips

• Dilbert: One early series of strips had Dilbert visiting a "Jiffy Med Center" and being treated by a physician with no medical training and no clue because they couldn't afford real doctors.
• The Far Side
  • One strip had a husband trying to practice home surgery on his wife using a Time-Life book and complaining that she's thrashing around too much.
  • The retrospective book The Prehistory of The Far Side had a bunch of comic sketches that were never submitted to newspapers for whatever reason. One of these had a bunch of doctors performing surgery. The head surgeon stops and says "Wow, halfway through the procedure and suddenly I'm drawing a complete blank. In fact, I think I'm an ice cream man."
• The now-defunct Norwegian comic strip Riskhospitalet (a pun on the real-life 'Rikshospitalet', the National Hospital of Norway) was about nothing but this: The cast were all a series of idiots and anyone sent there was in serious risk of a medical mishap of some sort.

Fan Works

• All Guardsmen Party: Due to the abnormal anatomy and physiology of Space Marines and the side-effects of Tyranid venom, Doc and Tink's attempts to administer first aid to Sergeant Gravis quickly devolves into this.
• A truly terrifying example in The Dragon King's Temple. Over the course of the first several chapters, Zuko is getting progressively sicker and sicker from elemental deprivation. Toph and Zuko both know that the only thing that can save him is some time outside under Sun, but the SGC repeatedly refuse to understand that "let us see sunlight" is not a metaphor for feeling confined and refuse to allow Toph and Zuko outside. What truly pushes it over into this trope is that one of the reasons they are so adamant about not letting Zuko go outside is precisely because he's suffering from elemental deprivation and they don't want to risk exposing him to Terran diseases with a weakened immune system.
• Played for Laughs in For Those We Cherish. Apothecary Memnon has no idea how to treat non-Astartes. When JNPR comes to him for help after Jaune gets injured, they spend most of their time telling him "No, Jaune does not have any of those organs you're talking about" and him working down his tools until he disregards his Narthecium entirely and eventually goes for an anesthetic needle that is as long as a human forearm and carries a dose for a Space Marine.
• Played for Drama in Sick Little Ponies (And A Dragon). When Fluttershy gets sick, her mark magic causes all of her animal friends to try and treat her. In whatever way they'd tend to a member of their own species. All at the same time.
• The Writing on the Wall: The archeological party's reactions to the tomb's curse would be the correct reactions to a sickness (remaining in place to quarantine the disease and burning the bodies to destroy pathogens). Unfortunately, they're exactly the wrong things to do in response to radiation poisoning. Radiation isn't contagious, so you want to get out of there to prevent further exposure, and burning the bodies only releases the radioactive particles into the air.
• In Boundaries, Blue instinctively tries to help Delta and Echo by licking their wounds and forcing them to walk. It is made abundantly clear that she's doing more harm than good.

Film - Animated

• The doctors in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut somehow botch Kenny's surgery so badly (at one point, they seem to be going in there with hedge trimmers) that they replace his heart with a baked potato. Somehow, he survived long enough for them to tell him he had three seconds to live.

Film - Live-Action

• Hot Shots! has the doctor for Dead Meat, who's more focused on whether the patient has a bigger penis, biting the patient's nose, and getting a morphine injection for himself than actually treating wounds.
  Dead Meat: I'm in a hospital! What could go wrong?
• In Houseguest, Sinbad's character is posing as a man known as a top-notch dentist. At one point, some other dentists ask him to demonstrate his technique on a tooth extraction. He starts off by accidentally washing his hands with Novocaine, and things just go downhill from there. He does somehow manage to get the tooth out, though.
• In the Italian movie "Le Comiche 2" the entire first episode revolves around inept healing. The protagonists are male nurses driving an ambulance. They run over a man that was trying to help the original victim of an accident. This causes a mixup with the nurses wanting to take this man to the hospital at all costs and this guy that wants to be left alone, flagging he is not the person in need. Unfortunately for him they are two lunatics that basically kidnap him and cause him all kind of physical damage along the way. He finally ends up in a hospital, where they manage to unintentionally check him in for a breast augmentation, mixing him up with a female patient. As the movies progresses we are able to see the result of the operation as they cause him even more toubles.
• In Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, race car driver Ricky Bobby is convinced he's been paralyzed after a crash and tries to prove it to his teammate Cal Naughton Jr. and his crew chief Lucius Washington by stabbing himself in the leg with a knife. After Ricky realizes he does have feeling in his legs, Lucius decides the best course of action is to cut the knife out of his friend's thigh.
  Lucius: (while driving a second knife into the wound) We'll use this knife to pry it out.

Jokes

• A doctor and an orderly come to a ward with patients awaiting treatment. The doctor looks at the first patient's files and says that the patient's left leg should be amputated, so the orderly immediately chops the arm off with an axe. With the next one, it's his right arm, which the orderly chops off as well. With the next one, the doctor says "The right leg. [Chop] I said leg. [Chop] I said right!"

Literature

• Harry Harrison's Bill the Galactic Hero loses a couple of limbs in battle and the replacements aren't particularly satisfactory as they are scavenged pretty much at random from the voluminous piles of body parts left lying around. In particular, his left arm was shot off and they replaced it with a right arm.
• A serious example in the Collegium Chronicles. At this point in Valdemar's history first aid training is discouraged by many Healers, and as a result Amily's broken leg isn't properly immobilized by her rescuers. By the time a Healer sees her, the bones have knit back together the wrong way, leaving her lame.
• The Guild of Barber-Surgeons in Discworld seem to mostly be this, at least until former Back-Alley Doctor Dr Lawn rises high enough in the profession to make some changes. In Feet of Clay, when Colon suggests calling a doctor in for Lord Vetinari, Vimes replies "Are you mad? We want him to live!" (which is why they call a veterinarian instead, more competent because the local mafia gets very angry when a racehorse dies).
  • Tolliver Groat of the Post Office sits somewhere between here and Worst Aid, all of it self-administered. Having a combination of hypochondria, a total lack of actual medical knowledge by even the lax standards of the Disc, and a total distrust of actual medical professionals, he does stuff like smear goose grease and bread pudding on his vest in ever-increasing layers and fill his trousers with two of the three ingredients for gunpowder. When he's eventually forced to see a real doctor, it's voiced that he's probably indestructible, given the sheer amount of medical malpractice/nonpractice he keeps applying to himself.
• In The Happy Return (the first Horatio Hornblower book), the ship's only surgeon is an unqualified and panicky assistant. Given that this is already 1803, this is bad news for wounded sailors. Lady Barbara takes over care of the wounded herself and is much more competent, providing better care and helpful suggestions.
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: Gilderoy Lockheart attempts to heal Harry's broken arm with a spell but accidentally removes all of the bones in his arm instead.

Live Action Television

• Dr. Leo Spaceman from 30 Rock. Granted he generally is only used to write prescriptions anyway.
  Jack Donaghy: [wanting to wake a patient from a coma] Couldn't you just inject something directly into his heart?
  Dr. Spaceman: I'd love to, but we have no way of knowing where the heart is.
  • Liz briefly dated a doctor who was so handsome that everyone was nice to him and gave him a free pass. This meant he was painfully dumb and utterly incompetent at everything he attempted, but believed he was highly skilled and talented. His abilities as a doctor were never really demonstrated, but the fact he couldn't perform the Heimlich maneuver wasn't a good sign.
• Arrested Development: This is how Tobias Funke lost his medical license (a psychotherapy license!), by giving CPR to a man that needed none and breaking several ribs. Then he demonstrated his lifesaving intent in court and broke more ribs.
• In The Beverly Hillbillies Granny brings her mountain doctorin' with her to Beverly Hills. She dislikes the drugstore because it has no drugs in it, "they should call it a what-not shop." Her "rumatiz medicine" is just bootleg whiskey. She has an old mountain cure for the common cold which a drug conglomerate wants to buy until they find out it's just grain alcohol and the prescription is to drink it daily, get plenty of bed rest and additional fluids, and your cold will be "miraculously" cured in about a week.
• In Band of Brothers, Moose is accidentally shot by a friendly sentry. Winters and Welsh provide first aid until the medic arrives. Doc Roe promptly informs them that they gave Moose a morphine overdose, which is far more likely to kill him than the bullets were, and chews them out for being that stupid.
• In the first episode of the first season of Blackadder, Edmund cuts off the king's head, then tries to revive him by placing it back on and pumping the kings arms up and down. Needless to say, it didn't work.
• In Breaking Bad, one of the drug dealers demands (at gun point) Walter to do "breath into his mouth and stuff" to the guy said drug dealer just beat to death. Walter points out that the technique is outdated, and it doesn't work.
• Kids in the Hall Dave Foley's Bad Doctor admits to coasting on charm and referrals, and in another sketch removes Mark McKinney's appendix and leaves him with a scar in the shape of a swastika, then orders the nurse to give him heroin.
  "It all started when I was a very bad science student"
  "How far can you coast on charm? Pretty far, actually."
  "I've just been named chief of surgery. Apparently I've logged more hours in the operating room than any other doctor at this hospital. What they failed to notice is that it's all been with the same patient."
  "I have to go tell the family the patient didn't make it. It's the hardest part about being a doctor (chuckles) I think!!
• The Myth: Xiao Chuan asks for anaesthetic. His rescuers (being from the Qin dynasty) have no idea what he's talking about, and when he explains they decide the best way to prevent him feeling pain is to knock him out.
• Our Miss Brooks: In "First Air Course", Miss Brooks purposely invokes this trope to avoid teaching the eponymous program.
• The "Historical Paramedics" sketches on Horrible Histories feature 'paramedics' from different historical eras applying period remedies to modern day patients, and usually leaving the patients in a worse condition than when they started, to the horror of the patient and onlookers. Similar ideas are used in the "Historical Hospital" and "Historical Dentist" sketches.
• Saturday Night Live had several sketches about "Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber'' (played by Steve Martin). He would order his patients to undergo bloodletting or some other medieval quackery, usually resulting in their disability or death.
• In Scrubs Doug is the worst intern ever, in fact he is so bad he makes the perfect coroner because he knows all the ways that a Doctor can screw up and kill someone.
  Doug: (examining a corpse) I'm betting he took a paracentesis needle to the aorta.
  Coroner: Have you seen this before?!
  Doug: Seen it? Upstairs they call that a 'Doug'!

Music

• "Weird Al" Yankovic's titular doctor in the Madonna parody "Like a Surgeon" is not good at all and knows it.
  It's a fact, I'm a quack
  The disgrace of the A.M.A.
  'Cause my patients die
  Yeah, my patients die
  Before they can pay

Tabletop Games

• A somewhat infamous Dungeons & Dragons After-Action Report had a DM discuss a time when the players were escorting a young orphan who came down with a minor cold. The players rolled a Critical Failure to diagnose him, and believed it to be a case of "explosive wommblosis", opting to put the orphan out of his misery by shoving him in a sack and smacking him against a tree until he died.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The closest thing Orks have to doctors are Mad Doks (or Painboyz), who frequently experiment on their patients. These range from having weapons grafted on to having your brain swapped with a squig's. Orks are so tough that it's really all they need; they can even recover from decapitation if somebody staples their head back on within a few hours.
  • In Dark Heresy, your own character can be this, if you attempt a Medicae check and roll poorly. You'll suffer an additional penalty for working on Xenos, unless they are Orks. With Orks you get a bonus, because they are so tough you can't possibly make the injury worse.... Orks, expecting a Mad Dok, will only seek medical treatment when they have no other choice.

Video Games

• Assassin's Creed: Odyssey: One questline has the Eagle Bearer having to deal with a health spa where snakes have gotten lose in one of the healing baths. The snakes were intended to lick the diseases out of patients, because this is Ancient Greece and Hippokrates has only just gotten started, so medical science is in its infancy. To them, this is a perfectly viable form of medicine.
• In Baldur's Gate III, the party befriends famous Gentleman Adventurer and Doom Magnet Volothamp Geddarm, who believes he's found a way to remove their mind flayer parasites. He then performs a crude surgery on the Player Character, jamming a needle and then ice pick into their brain, removing their eye. He then makes up for it by giving them a magical replacement that gives them True Sight.
• In Card Hunter, there is a low level healing spell called "Misguided Heal", that does two damage to your adventurer before healing the character for four gaining a net heal of 2. Useful if combined with armor. With the mail armor in game you can get four health instead of two due to the two initial damage being preventable with armor. Since the damage is applied first (and the healing isn't applied if the target dies) you can also use it as an improvised 2-damage attack.
• Crusader Kings: If you have a disease, your court physician can be called upon to apply all the wonders of 8th-14th century medicine to you. Sometimes this can help, whether from placebo or the physician actually knowing what they're doing (e.g. performing a successful surgery to remove a cancerous growth), but sometimes they can can leave you worse off than before. The flavor text indulges in a lot of Black Comedy, whether or not it works.
• In Deltarune Chapter 2, Susie gains a spell called Ultimate Heal, which, with a full TP Gauge, restores HP equivalent to her Magic stat +1... Which is barely above a single digit, if even that. Possibly because she's casting it as an attack spell.
  • She also has Ultimate Heal in the fangame Deltatraveler. It's still bad, and you're better off using either items or Noelle's Healing Prayer.
• Deliberately implemented in Dwarf Fortress when a dorf's Diagnostic skill is ridiculously low. The now-iconic example from the forums involved an infected cut being misdiagnosed as rotting lungs, and the "afflicted" organs duly amputated. Tragically, the patient didn't survive.
• EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: When Daitoku Igor is rescued from the Dark Force army, there is tension on how to remove the mind-control device embedded in his brain. The team has a medical doctor on hand, but the differences between human and alien physiology is too unknown - it's impossible to even begin to speculate on what could possibly be a safe operation. In all this drama, someone decides that with so many unknowns, they might as well just rip the device out. And do. Amazingly, this defies all odds and actually works, restoring Daitoku Igor to his pre-brainwashed state.
• The Y-17 trauma harness in Fallout: New Vegas was a suit of armor designed to carry someone back to a home base when they were injured, and even defend themselves due to "learning" to fight from their wearer. Due to poor design, this meant that it was moving them great distances in a way near-guaranteed to exacerbate their injuries (and if the home base wasn't defined, then the suit entered a "wander" state and just patrolled aimlessly). Unsurprisingly, most users of the harness died in one, and by the time you find them, they're still patrolling, with the skeletons of their old users still stuck inside.
  • You may cause this on your own on two separate occasions. At Nellis AFB and at Camp Forlorn Hope, you can offer to help the local doctors by treating various patients. With a sufficiently low Medicine skill, you will screw up and kill the patients horribly. (If you're secretly with the Legion, you may want to do this intentionally at Forlorn Hope.)
• Florence Nightingale in Fate/Grand Order is actually a nigh-inhumanly good physician and surgeon, and acts as a White Mage in gameplay. Unfortunately, she also has a 19th-century knowledge base and habits, and is under a curse that makes her obsessively want to keep everyone in perfect health. As a result, leave her to her own devices and she will throw someone into quarantine over a case of the hiccups and employ amputation as her first resort for every physical ailment. It doesn't help that she considers "the patient is dead and therefore not sick anymore" to be a more acceptable result than leaving them sick.
• Implied in the Mystery Case Files title Escape From Ravenhearst, in which an animatronic figure representing a Mad Doctor spouts off disturbing statements while acting out the part of surgeon in a creepy hospital diorama. One of his lines is "I should have gone to medical school...".
• In Persona 3, the school nurse Mr. Edogawa is a Hippie Teacher who has a fascination with the occult, and gives sick kids bizarre concoctions he cooks up that do nothing to actually improve their health (but raises the Player Character's Courage stat). Refusing his "medicine" will lead to him giving a random healing item instead (which can be used in battle but not for your cold).
• In RimWorld, survivors have a Medic stat that determines how effective they are at treating one another's injuries. Poorly-treated wounds may produce permanent scars, impairing a character's abilities and making the affected body part more vulnerable to future damage. And the chance of a Critical Failure of healthcare exists, which usually results in overly large/mistaken amputations and cuts in the wrong limbs and places entirely.
• Surgeon Simulator 2013 is built on this trope. In this game you perform surgery with intentionally awkward and clumsy controls, lots of inappropriate tools and very vague instructions about what you are actually supposed to do. The win conditions are also rather lax: A heart transplant counts as successful the moment the new heart is placed somewhere in the chest cavity, even if the patient's other vital organs are laying on the ground and the patient is seconds before bleeding out. The end-of-level message is "Looks fine to me, I'm sure he'll live."
• The Medic in Team Fortress 2 was a licensed doctor... before he did a malpractice in which his patient's skeleton went missing. He actually is a stunningly competent and ridiculously effective physician, capable of treating almost any wound and inventing a raygun that heals people. Unfortunately, he's also an extreme Mad Scientist; he could use standard methods, but he'd rather start grafting animal parts into the patient's body to see what happens. Despite this, some of his treatment methods work anyway: most famously, an incident in the comics where he decided to solve the problem of his companions having all their blood drained by simply pouring the blood back in through their wounds with a bucket. He advised the person who asked about how the blood types could be compatible to try not to think about it.
• Two Point Hospital: While the working cures are often as silly as the diseases, Holistix is a punching bag for the absolute worthlessness of their holistic and homeopathic cures. If their CEO is angered enough, he will attempt to poison your staff... and fail, because his homeopathic poisons are just as useless.

Web Animation

• In The Grossery Gang webseries arc "Get Well Spewn", the cures that Rocky, Meathead, and Fingers try and use to help a cold-affected Pizza Face are this. These include a dunking in molten hot sauce, a slushie-and-sour-milk concoction poured through his nostrils, and attempting to roll him up to squeeze all his snot out.
• Meet the BLU Medic has said Medic's medigun do the exact opposite of healing, actually killing whoever gets healed. It was rather telling that none of the rest of the team liked being healed for this reason, even before he used the medigun on them.
• Red vs. Blue has Doc, who has endorsed CPR as a valid treatment for a bullet to the head, treated a gunshot wound to the foot by rubbing the victim's neck with some aloe vera. Though as he's quick to remind people, he's not a doctor he's a medic. A doctor helps you recover, a medic just makes you feel better while you die. Later character Dr. Gray is an actual doctor and is perfectly capable of keeping people alive... in situations where they really probably shouldn't be.
• Ultra Fast Pony: In "Reading to Rainbow", Rainbow Dash is hospitalized for a broken wing. The doctor who treats her is so inept that the rest of the cast has to ask him if he's sure he's actually a doctor.
  Doctor: [examining an x-ray print] I'm afraid it doesn't look good. I tried connecting the dots, but they're not numbered. And without numbers, it's just chaos. Total chaos. I'm sorry, Rainbow Dash, but we're going to have to amputate your flappy things.

Webcomics

• Snake is portrayed as this in a Awkward Zombie strip parodying Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. The game's rather simplified medical treatment mechanics result in Snake just performing operations on his arm through trial and error until he considers himself healed. From what we can tell, he put on the bandages, then dressed the wound, then applied disinfectant, then stitched himself up, in that order—meaning, among other things, he stitched the bandages and dressing into his flesh. He also forgets to remove the bullet, and upon remembering this, digs it out with a combat knife without even bothering to take off the bandages first.
• Navaan in Oglaf claims to be a doctor, but her healing methods include such questionable practices as putting an acorn in the stump of an amputated limb and stuffing it with dirt, which she thinks will grow a new limb.
• In The Order of the Stick, Elan is called to heal an injured crewmember of an airship. The process of healing looks like hilarious quackery. Subverted in that Elan is a D&D bard and thus has some actual healing powers, if of lower potency than those of a cleric.
• Isabella from Paranatural notices a cut on teammate Issac's face and tackles him to the ground so that she can "help" him. She succeeds in wrapping his entire head in bandages like a mummy.
• In Rusty and Co., the gnoll cleric, who favors operating with construction tools.
• Nearly everything about the Awful Hospital...at least for human beings.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal provides the page image, along with a number of other "fake doctor" and "bad doctor" strips.
• A non-canon strip in Sidekick Girl has Val try to help one of the comic's creators with her back problems... via a 'healing spinal punch'. It doesn't work out.
• Discussed concerning Mikkel in Stand Still, Stay Silent. After having the latest work of the team's self-taught runic magic practitioner spontaneously catch fire in his pocket, shortly followed by the practioner in question going into trance along with the team's official mage, Emil turns to fellow Flat-Earth Atheist Mikkel for a little support in his currently shaken belief that magic is not real. Mikkel turns out to actually be in the same place as Emil ever since he worked alongside a Norwegian healing-oriented mage and noticed that her patients recovered as fast as his own. They both realize that the alternate explanation to magic being real is that Mikkel is actually lousy as a medic, which would be an uncomfortable truth as well.
• Dr. Crowley from Twistwood Tales is not the best at his job, as a lot of his methods (e. g. removing a loose tooth by tying it with string to a door’s handle and then throwing the door off a cliff in "Brave Boy") don’t then to mesh well with his patients.
• Unsounded: When Sette bites off Vanilla's finger Stockyard dismisses Vanilla's cries for help with;
  Go rub lotion on it.

Web Original

• The Onion: "World's Oldest Neurosurgeon Turns 100." The titular neurosurgeon is shown to be unable to hold a scalpel without his hands quivering, suffered a stroke in the 1980s, rates his number of surgeries as "800 to 3,000", and has a diploma authorizing him "for the treatment of the bad humors of the brain." Newspapers note that quite a few patients have died in his care, unsurprisingly.
• The SCP Foundation has SCP-049-J, a parody of Deadly Doctor SCP-049. While 049 is known for killing his "patients", this is framed as a result of his Touch of Death combined with his habit of seeking out "diseased" people for mysterious purposes, followed by performing strange procedures which typically end in the person being raised as an undead monster. 049-J, meanwhile, has a much simpler explanation for why it kills all its patients: it's completely nuts, and a moron. In the experiment log, it's shown trying to cure a sore throat by beating the person's neck in with a shoe. The article claims that the only reason 049-J is considered anomalous (besides its inhuman physiology) is that it has an uncanny ability to escape whatever medical disaster it just caused, and somehow convince people that it might be able to cure someone next time.

Western Animation

• Dr. Krieger on Archer is a subversion of this. He apparently isn't a real doctor (it seems his first name is actually "Doctor"), has no real concept of human anatomy and mostly performs highly questionable "mad science" under non-sterile conditions, but somehow usually ends up healing his patients and even making them better than they were before.
• Buddy Thunderstruck: Roby attempts to fake an injury at a truck stop in order to sue, but unfortunately for him, Buddy is under the impression that he can fix a broken back with Heimlich; and then what he actually does is attempt to perform CPR instead.
• Doctor Vindaloo, a recurring bit character on Courage the Cowardly Dog, has a doctorate hanging on his wall that actually reads "Quack" on it. His appearances usually consist of making a bleak and outlandish diagnosis, before reassuring the patient:
  "There is nothink to worry about. Nothink at ohl... but there is nothink I can do."
• Dan Vs.: In "Dan Vs. The Animal Shelter", two hospital orderlies mention offhand that only the patients with really good insurance get examined by a real doctor—everyone else just sees an actor dressed as a doctor. This becomes a Chekhov's Gag when, at the end, Dan gets his face badly scratched by a cat and has to go to the hospital:
  Doctor: Okay, let's get those pants off.
  Dan: Um, I'm here about my face being all scratched.
  Doctor: [chuckles] Oh, don't worry. I'm not a doctor.
  [Scare Chord. Episode ends.]
• Disenchantment: A health spa tries to cure drinking spoiled water by irritating the patient back to health, by having him tortured for twenty-four hours by a jerkass. Afterwards, the spa attendant admits that the cure could just be the passage of time.
• During an episode of Dragons: Riders of Berk, Gobber has to act as village healer while Gothi is away, only to end up setting a guy's leg on fire while trying to remove a dragon trap. And the 'remedy' he gave to another one to cure his reflux only causes him to regrow one hair, while giving him severe diarrhea. And the reflux is not even gone.
• Dr. Zoidberg of Futurama is supposedly an expert in alien medicine. Unfortunately, most of his patients are human, and he has repeatedly been shown to have virtually no working knowledge of human biology. Several years of "healing" the crew later and we get a line stating his doctorate is in art history. One episode shows that his name has become a byword in the medical community for absolute mind-boggling malpractice.
  • One notable example comes from "The Tip of the Zoidberg", where he spectacularly fails to heal the crew's ailments before they go to an "actual doctor" that successfully cures them.
  Zoidberg: Now open your mouth and lets have a look at that brain. No, no the other mouth.
  Fry: I only have one.
  Zoidberg: Really?
• Jellystone!: Subverted with Yogi; the trailer presents Yogi as incompetent (as he places his stethoscope on a flatlining patient's face), but the show shows that he's just as competent as Cindy Bear (the scene right after has him bring the flatlining patient back to life). Played straight with Boo-Boo, who while a decent nurse, is nowhere near ready to be a Doctor himself.
  Boo Boo: I'm being sued for malpractice!
• Lilo & Stitch: The Series: In the episode "Poxy", Pleakley gets a bizarre illness. When he tells Lilo and Stitch about it, their response is to attempt to "operate" on Pleakley - in Stitch's case, by way of a chainsaw.
• The Simpsons:
  • Dr Nick Riviera ("Hi, Doctor Nick!") is an amoral quack who'll show up at any medical emergency, sometimes pursued by angry former patients.
  Hospital intercom: Dr Nick Riviera, the coroner would like to see you. Dr Nick Riviera...
  Dr Nick Riviera: The coroner? I'm so sick of that guy!
  • Played with in the case of Dr. Hibbert, who is the Simpsons' normally competent family doctor. However, in Trilogy of Error, when Homer accidentally gets one of his thumbs cut off, Hibbert suggests that the other thumb should get cut off for "a sense of symmetry". Marge and Homer are then immediately seen driving away from Hibbert's office. This one is less about Hibbert specifically and more of a knock at HMOs; Homer, only having finger insurance, isn't covered for thumbs.
  Marge: Hibbert's really losing it. We're going to Dr. Nick's.
• When SpongeBob SquarePants gets the Suds, he at first calls Sandy to take him to the doctor, but then he gets scared by Patrick's horror stories about the doctor's office. He asks Patrick to cure him instead, but his "cures" - which include plugging up his pores, putting seanut butter and bread on his foot, pulling out his tooth, jumping on him, putting a very large bandage on him, and even medieval torture- only makes things worse.
• VeggieTales: The Silly Song "The Yodeling Veterinarian of the Alps" casts Larry the Cucumber as an eccentric veterinarian who believes that yodeling to the pets brought in will instantly cure them of all of their ills. Of course, in reality the yodeling does absolutely nothing and the reason the patients get over their various ills is because the nurse (played by Pa Grape) gives the pets' owners real medical advice behind Larry's back, but everyone thinks that it's solely the yodeling that's makes Larry's practice so successful. Then everything (quite literally) comes crashing down when the success gets to Larry's head and he denies Pa a pay raise, resulting in Pa doing nothing when Larry tries to heal a bear caught in several bear traps with his yodeling, to predictable results.

---