A young doctor was declared dead this morning after the assault that he had to suffer from the attendees of a patient just a few days back! Not just him, a bunch of many other young residents were attacked violently by a patients relatives in this same case. And this is just one incidence, many such incidences happen on a very frequent basis and have been on an unfortunate rise in the past few years. I am ashamed to even type that the doctors are beaten up, shamed, dragged into consumer courts and at times even abused by the patients for anything that goes unexpected!
I have grown up in a family submerged in medical science, and at present I reside in a campus full of medicine graduates, I have grown up seeing doctors and now that I am practicing as one too, I realize the level of responsibility, care, concern, and compromise that the doctors carry on their shoulders. Medicine is not an industry where things come easy, right from a naïve age when the other school kids enter graduate colleges and experience a life full of youth and fun, the medicine graduates are taught to be mature and responsible. In times today when specialization, super-specialization, and fellowships are a must to run a practice, the same graduates have to enter a race to get a seat to read further and further. While the people that they grow up with get stable in good jobs right after their graduation, the doctors are still uncertain about their stability and their security even after having read till n number of years. Be it compromising the periods of sleep at night or compromising their family lives yes they do it all so that they can learn more and work better because they don’t deal with systems or programs they deal with walking, talking human lives. From a Cardiac surgeon who performs a massive surgery to save a passing life to Dental surgeons who correct and restore your bite and your quality of life, we all deal with living beings!
With human body, my dear non-medico friends a+b is not always equal to c. With the complexity of the beautiful system which the nature made, the allergies, the responses, the micro-organisms and of course the psychology all come to play a role which your doctor understands, treats and cures. No matter how old or how young the doctor is, they put all their knowledge, skills and time to talk about and discuss about a patient that they are treating at any point of time so that they can give it their best! And it’s highly shameful that despite whatever they do, despite whatever quality of life that they themselves may be living they are still blamed and blamed endlessly. Right from the natural causes of death in an admitted patient to the huge bill that a corporate hospital may charge you, to the unavailability of beds due to rush in a hospital the doctors are held responsible for everything. So much so that the recent extreme and sad incidence even took a precious life.
If you my dear non-medico friend, work in a scenario like this, where you know you may be assaulted, killed, jailed for anything that deviates from the plan which you give your patients, would you still want to treat them? And would you still want to treat them with the same comfort? So many private practitioners today do not want to take a risk of even treating a patient whom they feel is having any complication? Reason? The doctor is saving his own life. Yes, the big private and government hospitals do take up all cases but the day is not far when even they may fall reluctant to do so, just to save themselves. Whom would you blame then, my dear non-medico friends? The doctors again I guess, because you talk to the systems which can’t assault you, answer you back, abuse you or kill you!
My post may sound harsh, but read it with a doctor’s emotion and you may even cry reading this. If they say don’t eat overnight and come you say they are starving you...if they say eat no problem then you say they are not doing the tests right! If they charge you for what they do they are looting you and if they attend your midnight call then it’s their duty! Spare doctors my dear friends you have no idea how much they sacrifice!
Dr Vandita Mishra
Email: vandita5jan@gmail.com
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