Since past many years, specially after the appearance of private hospitals of star value, we have been seeing many cases of vandalism on hospitals as also attacks on doctors and claims for monetary compensation from the doctors or the hospitals that treated the patients who did not survive.
In our city too, this kind of vindictive behaviour on the part of the patients as also their near and dear ones are not uncommon. As I remember, the then popular and famous B.M. Hospital, owned and run by Dr. C.B. Murthy, a well-known general surgeon in the 70s, 80s and 90s, soft-spoken, too gentle with patients and generally, on many occasions, had to face the wrath of the people connected to the patient who could not be saved or cured or whose hospital bill was too heavy to pay. Police help often came late to prevent the vandalism and the hospitals, being service organisation, did not venture to file Police complaint so also the doctors who were attacked. It was a delicate, difficult and dicey situation for them.
It is for this reason in our city about five years ago doctors, private hospitals and clinics took a novel step and formed an association called “The Mysore Association of Hospitals, Nursing Homes, Clinics and Diagnostic Centres,” MAHAN for short. Our weekly columnist and a well-known general practitioner Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD, is the President of MAHAN which is giving some hope to the traumatised and victimised doctors and the hospitals with the new-found strength to collectively face such violent acts and injustice. MAHAN will now interact with the Government agencies, Police, Public Prosecutor and other agencies in following up the investigation and the cases that either the victim or the Police have registered against the villains of the attack.
I do not know if MAHAN has been a boon or just a scarecrow. Let it be.
But here is good news to our Dr. Javeed Nayeem and his fellow doctors and medical entrepreneurs. Today’s newspapers carry some good news for them. The Deccan Herald has an item titled ‘No doctor can assure life to patient: SC’
This news must be music to the ears of all the doctors all over India. A Bench of Justices Hemant Gupta and V. Ramasubramanian has allowed an appeal filed by Bombay Hospital and Medical Research Centre against the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission’s order to pay Rs. 14.18 lakh to Asha Jaiswal and others for death of patient Dinesh Jaiswal due to medical negligence.
The Supreme Court said that ‘no doctor can assure life to his patient but can only attempt to treat to the best of his ability and if the patient does not survive, the fault cannot be fastened on doctors as a case of medical negligence.’ How true !
Like there may be a bad father but never a bad mother (very rare exceptions apart), there cannot be a bad doctor, though there may be some rare cases of greedy doctors. And a doctor does his best to the best of his ability.
My experience, as a hospital bird, is that the patient must be lucky to get a good doctor for treatment. Of course, each time, I was lucky. However, even otherwise, the patient has a choice of doctors. If he has made a wrong choice, why penalise the doctor?
Like a sting in the tail, the newspaper reports what the Court said: ‘It is too much to expect from a doctor to remain on the bedside of the patient throughout his stay in the hospital which was being expected by the complainant here.’ Amen
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Not condoning attack on doctors, one should understand that in India, any one with bags of money can get into a medical college-dozens of them are there as a business to squeeze tens of lakhs of Rupees to give admission. There after money plays its part in getting the student pass each exam and become a fully-fledged doctor. The path to become a MD is facilitated by money again. It is also known that national board is often swayed by influence from good quarters yo award it DNB, where money is also involved.
No wonder, diagnosis is often faulty, and the treatment is worse. Meanwhile, the poor patient would have spent all savings including the money got by selling his house.
In summary, the chances of getting a really good specialist are not high, and hence, those who can afford travel to the US or Singapore.
In India ,medical treatment like any product lacks quality,
Mr Ganapahy says: ” Our weekly columnist and a well-known general practitioner Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD,..”
Ouch, Mr Ganapathy, Nayeem is not amused being referred to as a general practitioner, although, you are right, in reality he is.
But, Nayeem considers himself a cut above a general practitioner, branding hid MD from that caste-ridden cesspit called Mysore University, as if it is a MD from Harvard University. Your archives show that time and again, he never tired of saying that he was a favourite student of 1970s K R Hospital physician called NA Jadhav dubbed then as the physician of Santhepet merchants, as he pocketed the thousands dished out by very obsese Santhepet merchants with multiple illnesses orn out of sitting on padded cushions all day in their whole sale shops, with exercise like counting wads of Rupees bills!
I am not surprised Nayeem is the founder president of that outfit you refer to, born out of personal experience, I suppose, as he never stops referring himself as a cardiologist, dishing out advice as to how to avoid heart attacks, never mentioning that he had one -a severe one , necessitating angioplasty procedure!
As the poster above has said, Mysuru is churning out hundreds of MDs, who got their medical college admissions through handing out lakhs of Rupees, rather than on merit. These neanderthals fleece patients, by conducting plethora of tests, never understanding the illness, but surely bankrupting the patients. Attacking these brainless specimens called doctors is bad, but then in any other Western society, these so called medicos would be sued out of existence. But India’s Supreme Court , like any other Institution in India is corrupt.