Doctors and Patients

Times have really changed from the early days of my childhood. In those days the family doctor used to mean everything. He used to treat the medical as well as mental symptoms – he used to be more of a family friend than a physician. He used to talk about medicines and also participate in family discussions, he used to be more of a friend, philosopher and guide to the family.

With the passage of time, the medical profession started becoming more and more specialized and commercial, in the bargain quite a few doctors have forgotten the Hippocratic Oath which they take at the time of passing out as young doctors. In the West, because of the threat of being legally penalized, doctors do not take even a small decision without running the patient through a gamut of tests. In India, earlier a doctor used to physically examine the patient by hand and stethoscope, listen to the symptoms described by the patient and arrive at a pretty accurate clinical decision and start to treat the patient. In the current scenario doctors prefer to refer patients to laboratories of their choice and run a whole lot of tests, whether necessary or otherwise, and get a cut from the lab – they have stopped using their analytical mind and succumbed to mammon! Many pharma giants also give cuts to doctors to push medicines from their company. The lure of money has become so pervasive that good sense seems to be dying an unnatural death. That is not to say that all doctors are commercial, but a majority are slowly going the commercial way and giving a bad name to a noble profession.

We have read about numerous cases, where the doctors do not accept patients, operate on the wrong limb, etc and get away with it. In India, we have a chalta hai attitude, and lax laws and corrupt officials which perpetuate this cancerous system, else the doctor could be sued for humongous amounts. The justice delivery system is so bad that sometimes the case lapses because the protagonist has passed away with the passage of time! In the West negligence is so prohibitively expensive for any professional and the justice delivery system so efficient that cases of negligence are hard to come by in the medical profession.

Unfortunately, in India, a lack of basic education along with the perception that all doctors are only interested in money and not the patient leads to blind violence against the doctors – in such cases the innocents get thrashed along with the not so innocent. In fact, in many cases the patient may not have died due to the negligence of the doctor but due to other causes but still the doctors bear the brunt of the violence. If doctor – patient relationships and the confidence the relationship inspired as in the earlier days had subsisted today one would not get to see or read the stuff one gets to nowadays.

The reason I thought about putting up this post is because of an article in todays’ TOI with respect to an eminent heart surgeon hiking his fees just half an hour before the operation. The fees which were agreed to were Rs. 7.5 lacs for the operation to be done at Lilawati Hospital and this famous specialist sends an SMS asking the patients son to call him. When the call s made he says he wants to revise the fees but does not quote a figure and the operation is called off at the last moment, resulting in the patient who was waiting for three days, getting angina pain and having to be admitted forthwith into the ICU at Lilawati. Dr. S. Bhattacharya, the doctor in question, has given some really lame and apparently false justification for his behavior. Just goes to show the extent to which even well known and extremely well of surgeons will go to for “just a few dollars more”! That is what actually induced my post – no ethics and morals any more – Mammon rules!