Aamir Khan has managed to ruffle quite a few doctors and has since appeared on almost all news channels to face the ire of some of these physicians.
Though one agrees that not all doctors are blood-sucking unscrupulous beings interested only in making money out of you, it is sad to know that some of these protesting doctors have launched a personal attack on the star. The syndrome is “people living in glasshouses should not throw stones at others” and the premise is Aamir’s divorce and second marriage some years ago.
Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter continue to be deluged with personal attacks on the actor’s personal life. He may or may not have been textbook correct in his personal life but that’s certainly not the issue here. To me, this means that these protesting holier-than-thou doctors obviously do not have a sound argument to counter Aamir’s episode on their community making a killing out of hapless patients.
Denying that doctors at all levels have a very unholy tie-up with medical representatives and path labs would be like saying there is no moon in the sky on a cloudless full moon night! The evidence of such malpractices is so huge that the best these doctors who came with a bargepole to attack Aamir with, could have done was to concede that such ills do exist and then perhaps argued that they may not be as all pervasive as Aamir’s research brought it out to be.
Then too they may have lost the argument but at least it would have been somewhat credible. With healthcare in such a sorry state, patients are half dead financially much before they reach the later rounds of their treatment. I personally know of doctors who have joined certain well-known hospitals on fabulous salaries signing contracts which link their variables with how much business they will bring to the hospital per patient.
The result? The poor patient is put through needless and very expensive clutch of tests which empties out his pocket. There have been instances when surgery has been advised and done when not required; ICU admissions prolonged for nothing but money, ventilators not switched off on dead patients and a whole lot of high-end medicines prescribed to give some pharma company or the other an edge in production.
Alarmingly, all these instances are neither few nor far between and they happen to almost everybody needing treatment. Hospital admissions are scarier. With no way of knowing what your patient really requires, and battling the constant fear of his or her death, most people treat the attending doctor as God. Even if you feel or know he is being unscrupulous, you have no option but to ignore it all and instead fall at his feet in abject surrender.
Such has been the pedestal on which doctors have been put due to their life saving profession that they collectively revolted when way back, some sort of accountability was forced on to them by bringing their profession under the consumer court jurisdiction. However, the Government being least bothered about healthcare, and infected with the virus of taking a cut out of every ill that ails the system, there has hardly been any effort on its part to curb the multi-billion-dollar expensive generic medicines scam that has been relentlessly pursued by big pharma companies.
These pharma companies have big budget campaigns to draw doctors, leading ones at that, into selling their medicines through dishonest prescriptions. Visit any Government or private hospital and you will see medical representatives hovering around doctors’ cabins in a bid to make them endorse and prescribe their brand of generic drugs. And it is the MR’s job to keep the doctors happy — they go to the extent of even doing the doctor’s personal chores like getting their bank drafts made, their work in Government offices pursued and even providing them with free holidays!
And this happens more in Government hospitals where the traffic is so much more that a pharma company does not mind spending a bit of money on these doctors who have the might of broad-basing their company’s products. So, what in the name of this long dead Hippocratic oath, are these doctors talking about when they say Aamir is going after them only as a cheap publicity gimmick?
Yes there is a clean brigade too, and thank God for that, but how many patients really get to these very few committed doctors who will give them the right treatment and the cheapest medicines available for a disease?
Doctors have a very strong hold over you as you are clueless and vulnerable without their advice and treatment. The power they have over you is the ultimate power in existence — the power of life over death. And nothing corrupts you more than ultimate power, especially in a phase when the noblest of professions have fallen to the relentless race of making money. So, you see, you may be a very self-respecting, no-nonsense person but when it comes your nearest one lying on a hospital bed, you will take the misbehaviour of the attending doctor without as much as making a squeak.
The most depressing thing about this entire healthcare mess in our country is the fact that now doctors have decided to shed the proverbial fig leaf altogether. Earlier, they would do unscrupulous things at least with their head and eyes down. Today, they have grown a hide so thick that they have no qualms staring you in the eye across a table and asking you ‘what’s wrong in me also wanting to give my wife diamonds like the rest of you?’ Do you have an answer to this? Not really if you concede that nobility in any profession is only a misnomer in today’s world. From being a societal DNA all those years ago, it has become a matter of personal choice — be it the profession of doctors, journalists or politicians.
Source: Published in The Sunday Pioneer, 17 June, 2012
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