In Response to Tehelka Magazine, Vol 8, Issue 5, Dated February 05, 2011
If you look online you will find a million articles, reviews, studies and so on which go on about how Doctors make all the money, how corporate hospitals fleece you, how corruption has crept into the medical system, Basically saying ‘The Medical Fraternity Sucks’. I believe its time someone looks at things from our perspective.
To start off, Lets talk about costs… I’ve heard people complain time again that corporate hospitals charge so much, they fleece you and so on. But I don’t see the same guy talk about how expensive dinner at the Taj is, or newspapers publishing articles on how you got to blow a few 1000 bucks to simply have dinner in an above average restaurant in Bangalore. How is it different??? Just like you have the smaller restaurants to cater to the less fortunate, you have government hospitals catering to the poorer sections…Go to a corporate hospital only if you can afford it. Plain and simple. Substandard care in government hospitals you say and you have to wait for hours... but what do you expect? We can see only so many patients an hour!!! Besides you don’t see people writing about the food poisoning the pavwalla brings… Aren’t they supposed to be judged by the same yard stick?
Then comes the ‘but your dealing with human lives here’… Let me get this straight, the guy who builds houses that come crashing down isn’t dealing with human lives. The guy selling water loaded with typhoid isn’t dealing with human lives. The guy building bad roads, the pavwalla and his poison, the methanol loaded hooch none of them are dealing with human lives. But we are!!! Now that’s hypocrisy at its best. Yes Medical care is a basic necessity, but so are food, water and housing. We don’t see the public demanding the prestige group or mantra group to dedicate half their career to building houses for the poor or Nandini to subsidise his biryani. Or do we?
Third thing is this accusation that ‘Doctors over investigate’. Since every article I’ve seen are so fond of quoting incidents lets do the same. A bike accident victim was brought to our hospital, found to be fine and sent back home. That night he developed chest pain and died. Now the hospital was charged with negligence. So what do we do? We find ways to protect ourselves. If you meet with an accident we order a Brain CT. Is it necessary… No it isn’t. Why do we do it… To protect ourselves from consumer suits. So who is responsible for this over investigating? Its You the public and not us. It’s your lack of trust that’s driven us to seek refuge in documentation via CT or MRI.
And then there are the stories about ‘they shifted him to ICU, put him on expensive drugs made us spend so much all for no use. He died’ On the flip side you hear ‘He was dying and the doctor did not do anything. They just stood there and watched him die’ Both these quotes are from relatives of patients in exactly the same condition from the same social strata. So basically if we do everything we can ‘We Suck’. If we do nothing at all ‘We suck’… So I guess its time we do what the world expects us to do. A half hearted job thats half way. No wait even then ‘we still suck’. How do you deal with a situation like this?
What about the bashing we get from leaders in other fields like the retired high court judge who did not wish to be named. He developed a urine infection after he needed a catheter for treatment at a prominent corporate hospital. “I had told the doctor I needed preventive antibiotics because of my diabetes and vulnerability to urine infection. He said I did not need it. I did get a urine infection and had to spend an extra 10 days there”. Or Narendra Puri of Gurgaon went to a doctor after an attack of acidity and claimed the doctor had placed the nodes of the ECG all wrong. All I can say to the judge is if you aren’t trained in a subject, either Read up or Shut up. Firstly those antibiotics you talk about aren’t indicated and secondly if you take drugs like that, Resistance is going to bite you in the A**… so listen to your doc. He knows what he is doing. And Narendra Puri, if fabricating a story like that is your quest to fame, I pity you. A senior doctor suggesting a stent after seeing an ECG??? Give me a break.
I know end of the day you hear ‘Medicine is a noble profession’ and so on. But haven’t we already done our time. We spend 9 hard years struggling to become a doctor and at the end of it all this is what we get? This? So before you pass judgment let me just say one thing… Part of our internship in medical school is spent serving in the rural setup. Every doctor in our country has done it. These people need doctors yes… But they also need engineers to build roads/houses, lawyers to advise them, teachers, specialists in agriculture and technology. I don’t see any of these guys being posted there. Why not? After all they need you? Don’t you too need to give back the way we do?
I’m not saying put us on a pedestal or sing songs in our name… All I’m saying is give us the respect we deserve. Stop pointing fingers and just let us be.
