Howie Mandel explains why compliments about your age sting
Howie Mandel explains why the compliment “You look great for your age” is misplaced on “Live with Kelly and Mark.”
Howie Mandel has opened up about a rare skin disease he contracted as a child and how doctors’ treatments left him with lasting trauma.
During a recent appearance on the In Depth With Graham Bensinger podcast, Mandel, 70, revealed that he had sand fly larvae under his skin as a boy.
“It was like a horror movie,” Mandel said, recalling seeing the bumps on her body move. To make matters worse, he added, doctors displayed his condition at a dermatology convention in his hometown of Toronto. The experience helped heighten his “sick factor,” Mandel said, and the television personality has long been open about his struggles with severe OCD and germanism as an adult.
Although the skin disease Mandel experienced is rare, the trauma he endured at the hands of doctors is one sadly shared by others. Mandel’s comments are an important reminder for doctors around the world to listen to their patients and pay close attention to their care, said Dr. Bayo Curry Winchell, a family physician and health advocate. Currie Winchell founded Clinicians Who Care, a database aimed at connecting patients with empathetic doctors.
After all, research shows that the trauma we experience early in life can affect our health as adults, Curriewinchell says. “Those memories can impact your overall physical and mental health and influence what diseases you develop later in life,” she explains.
Howie Mandel’s rare skin disease and the lasting trauma it caused him
For Mandel, the pandemic “didn’t stop horror movies,” he said. He added that at a dermatology conference, he was placed on a table in his underwear and his body was displayed for others to see. When nurses held him down and applied liquid nitrogen to the boil, the skin “scorched and bubbled” before bursting. He said this happened when he was 6 or 7 years old.
“I was screaming,” Mandel said. “They did that. And my mother didn’t know what they were going to do, so she took me and took the straps off the table and said, ‘You guys are animals. Don’t do that.'” And she took me away. ”
Every night after that, the mother would take a rough washcloth and some alcohol and rub one of the bumps until the skin broke, bled, and killed the larva that was there. He said she got them all.
“It’s traumatizing,” Mandel said. “There was something living under my skin. So I had some kind of element of the disease.”
How can patients stand up for themselves?
Mandel is not alone in feeling mistreated by doctors. That’s why it’s important for patients to advocate for themselves, Curry Winchell says. Physicians need to keep their patients’ emotions in mind and understand that a patient’s health also includes their mental health.
“It’s really important for doctors to think broadly first and not just have that first thought in their head of, ‘Oh, she’s not sleeping well, she’s a mother and she has children, so it must be just a mother problem,'” Curry-Winchell says. “No, it could be a lot of things. It could be a thyroid problem, it could be a heart problem, it could be cancer.”
If you feel like your doctor is ignoring you, there are ways to respectfully but firmly ask to be taken more seriously, she says.
“One of the ways to work through that is to be able to say, ‘I know you think this is it, but what else can you think of?’” she says. “And if you feel rejected and dismissed, respect that, because you know your body best.”
