Apollo's Ire

A good doctor treats a disease. A great doctor treats a patient. The medical education system, which I am a part of, is probably suffieciently equipped to churn out good doctors. But, rarely does this framework go beyond the realms of scientific teachings and cultivate a batch of great doctors. Free medical services do not give you the license to compromise on the quality of healthcare - something which professionals associated with government hospitals all over the country need to be reminded. When you become a doctor and undertake the Hippocratic Oath, you embark on a voyage in the sea of humanity. Storms in the forms of diseases have to be weathered and newer and better routes to good health need to be constantly chartered. Sadly, the money-making tendencies and the lack of a moral dimension to medical practice has brought about a partial, if not complete, erosion of these extremely essential social ingredients of medical profession.

I have watched with my own eyes, a patient first become a clinical history, then an examination, a diagnosis, a chart, a case number and eventually a shabbily stored hospital record. I have seen a sick man stand in line for six hours, waiting and still waiting, to be shuffled through an inefficient system of impatient receptionists, an overworked nursing staff and a breed of doctors who couldn't care less. I have seen patients in a pathetic state being robbed of whatever little comfort and dignity they carried when they entered the hospital premises. I have seen them languishing in their beds by the day, oblivious to the hustle-bustle in the wards. I have heard them howling in the nights with noone to alleviate their pain. I have watched a patient being told bluntly that he had cancer - irrevocable and invariably fatal - and then shoved out of the clinician's room to ponder over his impending end. I have seen twenty abdomens being examined in thirty minutes without so much as a glance at the fear writ large on the face of the patients. I have seen the facial muscles of an old man's wife twitch as two junior residents mutter gross jargon with sardonic smiles over her husband's ailing body.

I am ashamed that such inhuman actions are perpetrated under the guise of State-sponsored charity. I am ashamed that the sick of the society are seen as liabilities and obligations. I am ashamed that we have become so insensitive and academically carried away that we are more interested in the disease rather than the diseased. The worrying rise in the incidence of nosocomial (hospital acquired) cross-infections is another indication that all is not well with our public tertiary health services. Patients instead of getting treated, often go out in a worse situation than ever before. They are overloaded with empirical pharmacological agents and acted upon as experiments for the young and the ignorant. Mind you - the situation is this bad only in the civil hospitals. Their private counterparts literally pamper their patients even if it is eventually only to fill their own pockets. The time has come to infuse humanity back into medicine. The time has come to understand that your patient is someone's father, brother, husband or son and if not even that - atleast he is a fellow human being, created and loved by God, just as you are. The time has come to win back the faith of the Gods and carry out in earnest the job entrusted to us. It might be a mere professional routine to us but for someone else it is a matter between life and death...