Deification of doctors

By PADMA DEVKOTA

Several years ago I had taken a cardiac patient to the Emergency Ward of Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital (TUTH). As we waited for the cardiologist to arrive, a young boy who turned out to be a pediatrician from Kanti Children's Hospital arrived in a white coat wearing his stethoscope around his neck. He was there to use his influence over the interns of the Emergency Ward for the benefit of his patient. A senior nurse got into a friendly conversation with this young pediatrician and I overheard her say, "No wonder everyone greets you like a god. You are a god."
This senior nurse was apparently voicing a general public opinion. Medical practitioners, like rulers and educators, have received much respect from this society in the past. The Vedantic equation "That Thou Art" has always facilitated apotheosis, though more unceremoniously than in the case of the rulers of ancient Egypt or Rome. If scriptural promulgation of the concept of parents, teachers and guests as gods receive mixed reactions from people today, overwhelmed and grateful patients of medical practitioners who save lives continue deifying them to the extent that some of the less critical ones appear to actually believe in their own apotheosis.

Generally, the Hindu god is excessively honored and admired with full faith in the powerful influence of such a deity over the lives of people as well as over the course of nature. They are worshipped because they represent the good and desirable aspect of our nature and, as a result, are considered as friends of human beings. Since gods stand for pro-life endeavors and aspirations, the presence of sickness and death among human beings indicates, not the incompetence of gods to heal and cure, but the dearth of mortal comprehension of divine will. Gods cannot err.

The medical practitioner, too, is a healer and a savior. Even the simple secrets of Biochemistry are mystic coding to the layman whose sense of awe is augmented by the unimagined exchanges of ions and molecules in reactions he will never understand. Ignorance of the functioning of nature and a deep-seated appreciation of anything that promotes life has led to a paganistic worship of the divinized for centuries. It is exactly such a misguided faith that has given rise to the apotheosis of medical practitioners and a consequent administrative overprotection of such people whose incompetence has remained a sacrilegious concept to the average, uneducated mass. To these, recovery testifies to the doctor's competence; death is the will of God.

Medical Science itself is still very far from its desired goals of understanding the mysteries of life and death. While honest and sincere efforts on the part of research scientists have helped the application of findings to life saving tasks, competence, attitudes, and work environment affect daily results in hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, health posts and other such places. The simplistic equation of a medical practitioner to a god only complicates the issue of individual competence and creates other attitudinal problems in Medical Ethics.

In terms of Medical Ethics, the doctor-patient relationship seems to have deteriorated in more recent times. Some general complaints floating in the air are: physicians, instead of referring patients to specialists, will handle any case themselves; they do not give sufficient time for diagnosis because they have many patients in their clinics; they invite patients to their private clinics instead of giving them appointments for follow-ups in the hospital itself; they prescribe general antibiotics too easily for all sorts of maladies; they are negligent and irresponsible; and, they are too money-minded.

Not everything that floats has significant weight. Medical practitioners are emulated (and even looted or blackmailed) for the money they make. Any intelligent person who has both earned and bought his or her certificate for over Rs. 2,50,000.00 naturally feels the urge to at least recover the capital investment with interest. In the process of financial recovery, some doctors do not know where to stop so that their oath of service to humanity lies submerged under selfish pursuits. This is when things begin to become serious.

And, as if in keeping with the above complaints, in more recent days we have been reading news about medical practitioners being beaten up for various reasons. Such acts of beating up medical practitioners are symbolically iconoclastic in the context of the general belief that these practitioners are gods. But, what is worse is the fall from professional heights of those medical practitioners whose growing faith in their own apotheosis has resulted in unwanted behavioral modifications.

Nevertheless, the public too has many behavioral modifications to accomplish. The long absence of good governance in this country has resulted in the rule of might. No civilized world will accept the taking of law into private hands, be it an organized non-governmental body or a physically strong individual. In simple words, it is wrong to beat doctors, teachers, working staff or anybody whosoever. The rule of law demands that there be a court of justice where a person be given a chance to defend himself or herself before being punished. Often, what might appear to be an individual's fault is in reality that of the faulty system within which the person functions.

Recently, for example, I underwent a minor surgery in a private nursing home. When I presented myself for the follow up one Friday at 4:30 p.m., the surgeon arrived at 6:25 p.m. although his OPD hours were from 4:00 to 6:00. Naturally, I was about to explode despite my educated restraint. Furthermore, I was supposed to be the second man in; but, the nurse manipulated the cards inside and I was called after three other people were examined. Had I complained, they would have told me that these people were more serious cases.

The surgeon was late because the nursing home had allowed him to hold surgery and OPD at the same hours. Professionally, making patients wait in an ill-ventilated lounge for two hours just because one has a number of surgery cases to accomplish is an unethical practice. Patients too have their own work to do. From my several visits to this nursing home I know that this is the regular daily practice in this department. New patients, who are told that the doctor is late TODAY, take it for granted that such busy gods have a right to be late. So, they suffer in silence the tedium of eternal waiting.

What grieved me the most was that the surgeon did not apologize to his patients for being more than two hours late. He will never believe that gods can make mistakes such as this.

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