THESE HORRIBLE DOCTORS

Last night, I was traveling in 1 class of an aircraft. I soon came to understand that the middle-aged person sitting by the window was a collector and the portly person in the middle seat was a minister. My two neighbors seemed to know each other. The minister was wearing a lot of jewelry. On his right wrist were a bracelet and a Rudraksha on his neck.

They had no idea who I was. After the preliminaries with his neighbor, the minister inquired 

“When are you likely to be promoted as a secretary? "

The IAS replied, “By January 2020 sir if everything goes well.” 

“And when will you be eligible for the post of Chief Secretary ?” 

“It will not be sir as I am a conferred IAS” 

“Oh!” the minister exclaimed. “I was told that the regular IAS fellows look down upon the conferred ones.” 

“True sir. They do not involve us in anything. We will not be in their WhatsApp group either. Most of the direct recruit IAS fellows are from the north, and they keep to themselves and keep us out.”

The airplane started rolling, and the collector's telephone rang, and as he was replying, an air hostess leaned over me and signaled him politely to put his phone off. “No sooner does a phone ring in an airplane, these people appear from nowhere." The minister said sarcastically. And as the plane lifted off, the minister’s phone rang. He fumbled a little to silence it. He neither switched it off nor put it in airplane mode.

A while later, I was served steaming Maggie noodles, and I had started to savor them.“You know!”, the minister was telling the IAS, “The tasty powder that comes with these noodles will cause colon cancer when mixed in boiling water, and the people do not know this. It is a big evil plan by developed countries like America and China to poison developing countries and cause cancer.”

Their conversation then turned towards doctors and medicine. “You know, these doctors give some pill to cure a liver condition knowing fully well that in due course the drug will cause kidney damage. Then the liver patient will become a kidney patient and will continue to be their patient forever" The minister continued. “Doctors also give medication for migraine, which, over time, affects the brain and make the patient dumb. This patient continues to visit the same doctor until the patient or the doctor dies. This is the common trick doctors play.”

I felt a little uncomfortable in my seat but kept my calm and pretended not to listen to their conversation. Now it was the turn of the IAS. “Very true sir. I agree with you. Once I took my 84-year-old father to a big hospital in the middle of the night with severe stomach pain. The chief doctor said, ‘Your father has a mass in the rectum and will require an operation to remove it. Thoroughly confused, I left the place with my father. Then I realized it was due to constipation. For the last one and a half years, my father is passing motion easily to this day.

He continued, “Just a few weeks ago, my brother’s son had consumed some fried mutton and developed abdominal pain. He was taken to a hospital close to his house. The doctors took scans and concluded as appendicitis needing urgent surgery. My brother panicked and then called me. I told him to go to the General hospital. The chief doctor in GH asked him only one question, “Did you eat too many parathas?” and sent him home.

He further said “these doctors ask the local labs to report any biopsy as cancer and start treating patients with very costly cancer drugs, and after the patient has exhausted all his money they told him “Your cancer is cured!” The minister agreed “Yes true. These doctors are big-time commission agents. They get a commission in prescribing blood tests, scans, and drugs. Some doctors make a fortune out of these commissions. Doctor profession is the worst profession and doctors are the worst people” he concluded.

Suddenly, the minister started sweating profusely. He held his chest on the left due to some pain and rested his head over the collector's shoulder. The collector called the air hostess to get some water and a doctor. There was an announcement on the public address system. There was no response as there was no other doctor. The hostess came to me and inquired whether I was a doctor. 

I had to agree as I had given my personal details and they could easily find out from my name on the list. I was in dilemma whether to attend on him or not. My conscience and ethics of my profession persuaded me to attend on him. I did the normal check-ups and found he was having high BP. I gave him medicines to lower his BP and to sleep for a while. I was wondering what most of the politicians and bureaucrats were corrupt but they talked ill about a noble profession due to a few black sheep.

I was helpless and I wanted to counter their statements but realized it would be in vain. This was the opinion of a minister and a bureaucrat on doctors, and I wondered what would be the opinion of an ordinary citizen. If there was a national opinion poll on doctors and their integrity, I could understand what would be the outcome of the polls. Everyone seemed to have a bad experience with doctors, hospitals, and prescriptions.

We spend decades, years, days, and hours together discussing the ways and means of improving patient outcomes, decrease operative morbidity, struggle to bring a multi-organ failure patient back to life.  But people talk ill of doctors. How can we change this public opinion? It looks as though it can get only worse. In days to come, doctors may even hesitate to suggest the right treatment for a patient.