Cruise ship doctor explains onboard 'bread and butter' illness

A doctor has revealed what they call the ‘bread and butter’ illness that takes over most of their cases on cruise ships.

Traveling onboard a ship is a time to relax and enjoy the ride, but getting sick is apparently quite a common sight, per one expert.

A doc who has worked on a cruise ship for some time, has taken to Reddit to explain the different types of conditions they have seen, as well as the challenges of the job.

They took to the subreddit r/AMA [Ask Me Anything], there they gave people free reign to ask everything they wanted to know about cruise ship illnesses.

They wrote: “I have been a physician on a cruise ship for about a year now. I completed my residency in internal medicine, fellowship in critical care, and worked as an intensivist for around 3 years but wanted a lifestyle change.”

After calling the TV show, Dr Odyssey, ‘very dramatized’, they call themself 'an open book except for which cruise line I work for’.

The doctor revealed what the 'bread and butter' illness is (Getty Stock Images)

Quickly, people wanted to know a lot of information, but the very top comment came from a Redditor who was interested in a ‘common’ health problem the doctor had seen that wasn’t your standard ‘drank too much’ or ‘hate the feeling of being on the sea’.

They asked: “Besides motion sickness and alcohol related issues, what's another common nautical issue you come across that is land dwellers may not think about?”

To this, they said they 'see a lot related to overeating or eating something that didn’t “agree” with them’, which they call their ‘bread and butter cases’.

The doctor revealed those issues include things like ‘indigestion, GERD flare ups, foodborne illness,' and so on.

Typically, anything that comes from the digestive system.

They said it's caused by eating too much of something that upsets the stomach (Getty Stock Images)

The doctor also went on to answer a question about the ‘craziest’ thing they’d seen onboard, which was a very dire health situation.

This was ironically another digestive problem, but albeit a lot more serious.

They responded that it was a ‘Cirrhotic GI bleed,’ as they elaborated on the tense moment: “Patient came in complaining of black blood in his stool, ran a CBC and found out he was severely anemic, needed a blood transfusion and probably would’ve died without it. The problem was we don’t carry blood products on the ship, so I had to look through medical records of the crew and luckily someone had a compatible blood type.”

Aside from that, there was another question that doesn’t involve the digestive system, but also oddly relates to the exit of the final digested product - the rectum.

When asked how many people come to them after ‘falling’ on a shampoo bottle, they claimed ‘no judgment’, stating: “I do see a lot of ‘accidental’ rectal foreign bodies. But hey, no judgment here.”