Suman K Sharma
We go to him under duress. We expect him to relieve us of our misery. In that moment of pain and anxiety, he is our only hope and support. We betray to him the most intimate secrets of our existence; and we are ready to offer him all that we have. Just to get relief. If not God, in doctor we trust.
No doctor is God. He is a human being like you and me. The same heart beats in him and the same mind makes him what he is and what he isn’t. He too has his passions, his little and big pains and aches; his own cross to carry. Plus he has us: his patients.
That said, doctors are men and women of profession. They are intelligent, hard working and highly skilled. Giving us the right treatment is their call of duty. ‘Right treatment’ is the key to the doctor-patient relationship that must be kept in sight by both the sides. Problems are bound to arise when it is ignored.
And what is the right treatment? For a doctor it is to exercise all his professional skill and acumen to rid the patient of the malady and save life. For the patients it is to be patient.
Look at this scene in the emergency ward of a government hospital. An etiolated gray-haired man is talking querulously to the young intern attending a seriously wounded accident victim. The old man, a case of chronic constipation for the past two years and having severe cramps in his stomach, is shouting that he had arrived in the emergency earlier than the accident victim and should have been attended to first. The doctor protests that the wounded man – all blood and gore – would die if there is a moment’s delay in providing him medical aid.
Or consider this: a young woman is wheel-chaired for a certain medical procedure by her husband and her mother. The patient retches copiously as soon as she is brought into the room, splattering the floor with her foul-smelling vomit. The doctor tries to reassure the attendants that there is nothing the serious about the patient. Ignoring his professional verdict, the attendants insist that the procedure be started immediately. The doctor comes out of the room and phones the safaiwala to attend to the mess. Mindless of the stench, the husband asks the doctor rather brusquely, “You carry on with the procedure on my wife, yaar.” Pat comes the response from the offended doctor, “I am not your yaar. And you better keep out your wife from the room till it is disinfected….”
There are instances galore where the patients or their attendants try to impose upon doctors and other care-givers out of a misplaced sense of their own priorities. Such self-centered approach jeopardizes the established drill in a medical facility, putting their own and many other lives at grave risk.
Doctors have frequently to wrest fellow human beings from the jaws of death. And they don’t come cheaply. According to one estimate, it can cost upto Rs.40-50 lakh to secure a plain MBBS degree. No wonder that there is just one doctor for every 1,722 persons in India. The moot point is how many of us will keep all this in mind the next time they visit a hospital.
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