We need more men like Dr Harsh
Last week, a young man who did good to many he didn’t even know, died in a tragic, unexplained road accident in Bali where he had gone to attend a medical seminar. You can call it nothing other than celestial cruelty that a person who was there always for everyone had no one next to him when he took his final journey. Such is fate — unquestioned, unmoved and unpredictable.
Some may know Dr Harsh Kumar, a radio-oncologist formerly with the AIIMS, as the person who led the anti-reservation stir and battled the policies formulated by the then Health Minister Ramadoss. But many, many more would, more importantly, remember him for the help he extended one and all — waving of fee of dying patients, getting unknown and harassed families access to top doctors in AIIMS, doling out cash to the poor, starting projects to help the underprivileged, working 24X7 himself to save lives and always sporting a smile when you approached him, he was more of a modern messiah than a modern doctor.
Even when he was unceremoniously shifted out of AIIMS, officially because his contract had ended but apparently for his anti-establishment activities, people would approach him for a word he would put in at AIIMS where all doctors respected him not only for his doctoral capabilities but also for his inherent goodness of being.
Dr Harsh died young and unexpectedly, and it would be heartrending to even visualize how his old parents and pregnant wife would stand by helplessly as he is laid to rest at the Lodi Road crematorium tomorrow, a week after he lost the battle to the ventilator lying alone in a Bali hospital.
Dr Harsh finds mention here because he was someone who many in our doctor community have ceased to be. What with crass commercialisation creeping into every nook and cranny of urban life, the good old hypocratic oath is dying as lonely a death as honesty did long ago.
Add to this is a Government as unfocused on healthcare as a man with acute vertigo is and you have a perfect recipe for disaster. The doctors, most of them aiming to make a good upper middle class life for themselves and their families, have become more like toothpaste sellers having shed their nobility of profession without a thought to scruple. I know one personally who quit a strand he specialised in (internal medicine) to study rheumatism as “this particular lifestyle disease is a growing one which will get me much more money.”
Most urban doctors have joined this demonic race of chic existentialism, minting money out of public ailments, while the rural ones have all but given up the pretence of even being doctors, conveniently blaming it on non-existing medical infrastructure.
Government hospitals may still have the best doctors but to get to them is as difficult as sipping water on the moon, unless of course you have the right contacts. The OPDs at these Government hospitals, including the premiere institute AIIMS, are such stress pots that even the hale and hearty feel queasy about going there with ailing relatives. As Dr Harsh once revealed as an explanation to brash fellow doctors, a single one has to examine and treat more than 500 patients a day!
This brings us to the private hospitals where the sky is the limit when it comes to paying the bills. Even the best of the best are nothing more than mint machines, exacting the very last penny even from the plushest fur-lined pocket.
Not one but many doctors on the rolls of a top private hospital in Delhi have admitted privately how the main criterion for getting a job in this particular multi-speciality facility is to get business of not less than Rs 1 lakh per patient under their care! One doctor who left this well-known and highly rated hospital soon after joining, said he did so as his conscience could not take it anymore. “I prefer to be with the people in a Government hospital where there is no need to play into the hands of private administrators and prescribe expensive treatments, tests and surgeries which may not be required at all,” he said.
But people like him, and Dr Harsh, are few and far between in wards both private and general. It is true that raining death all around tends to make any doctor insensitive but to become unavailable, arrogant and excruciatingly expensive for patients is not right. Suffice it to say, some professions are condemned to be noble and no one should be allowed to tear that fabric apart -- the medical profession is one such strand that needs urgent preservatives.
That Indian life is cheap is a well-documented fact. But to make it cheaper still by an incoherent healthcare policy is something that the Government needs to rectify. But that, like poverty, will take generations to be sorted out. Till then it is doctors like Harsh that the nation needs not just to take care of public problems but also to instill a sense of commitment back into a profession that was originally meant to give life to humanity. God should have spared this great doctor for us. But then as they say, the Lord needs good men as much as we do.
Published in Sunday Pioneer, April 18,2010. http://www.dailypioneer.com/249914/We-need-more-men-like-Dr-Harsh.html
Some may know Dr Harsh Kumar, a radio-oncologist formerly with the AIIMS, as the person who led the anti-reservation stir and battled the policies formulated by the then Health Minister Ramadoss. But many, many more would, more importantly, remember him for the help he extended one and all — waving of fee of dying patients, getting unknown and harassed families access to top doctors in AIIMS, doling out cash to the poor, starting projects to help the underprivileged, working 24X7 himself to save lives and always sporting a smile when you approached him, he was more of a modern messiah than a modern doctor.
Even when he was unceremoniously shifted out of AIIMS, officially because his contract had ended but apparently for his anti-establishment activities, people would approach him for a word he would put in at AIIMS where all doctors respected him not only for his doctoral capabilities but also for his inherent goodness of being.
Dr Harsh died young and unexpectedly, and it would be heartrending to even visualize how his old parents and pregnant wife would stand by helplessly as he is laid to rest at the Lodi Road crematorium tomorrow, a week after he lost the battle to the ventilator lying alone in a Bali hospital.
Dr Harsh finds mention here because he was someone who many in our doctor community have ceased to be. What with crass commercialisation creeping into every nook and cranny of urban life, the good old hypocratic oath is dying as lonely a death as honesty did long ago.
Add to this is a Government as unfocused on healthcare as a man with acute vertigo is and you have a perfect recipe for disaster. The doctors, most of them aiming to make a good upper middle class life for themselves and their families, have become more like toothpaste sellers having shed their nobility of profession without a thought to scruple. I know one personally who quit a strand he specialised in (internal medicine) to study rheumatism as “this particular lifestyle disease is a growing one which will get me much more money.”
Most urban doctors have joined this demonic race of chic existentialism, minting money out of public ailments, while the rural ones have all but given up the pretence of even being doctors, conveniently blaming it on non-existing medical infrastructure.
Government hospitals may still have the best doctors but to get to them is as difficult as sipping water on the moon, unless of course you have the right contacts. The OPDs at these Government hospitals, including the premiere institute AIIMS, are such stress pots that even the hale and hearty feel queasy about going there with ailing relatives. As Dr Harsh once revealed as an explanation to brash fellow doctors, a single one has to examine and treat more than 500 patients a day!
This brings us to the private hospitals where the sky is the limit when it comes to paying the bills. Even the best of the best are nothing more than mint machines, exacting the very last penny even from the plushest fur-lined pocket.
Not one but many doctors on the rolls of a top private hospital in Delhi have admitted privately how the main criterion for getting a job in this particular multi-speciality facility is to get business of not less than Rs 1 lakh per patient under their care! One doctor who left this well-known and highly rated hospital soon after joining, said he did so as his conscience could not take it anymore. “I prefer to be with the people in a Government hospital where there is no need to play into the hands of private administrators and prescribe expensive treatments, tests and surgeries which may not be required at all,” he said.
But people like him, and Dr Harsh, are few and far between in wards both private and general. It is true that raining death all around tends to make any doctor insensitive but to become unavailable, arrogant and excruciatingly expensive for patients is not right. Suffice it to say, some professions are condemned to be noble and no one should be allowed to tear that fabric apart -- the medical profession is one such strand that needs urgent preservatives.
That Indian life is cheap is a well-documented fact. But to make it cheaper still by an incoherent healthcare policy is something that the Government needs to rectify. But that, like poverty, will take generations to be sorted out. Till then it is doctors like Harsh that the nation needs not just to take care of public problems but also to instill a sense of commitment back into a profession that was originally meant to give life to humanity. God should have spared this great doctor for us. But then as they say, the Lord needs good men as much as we do.
Published in Sunday Pioneer, April 18,2010. http://www.dailypioneer.com/249914/We-need-more-men-like-Dr-Harsh.html
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