By Talha Masud
In older days, going to a ‘Doctor’ would be the reasonable panacea for almost each patient who approached him but changing market trends have made more social and less economic services like medical aid, a sheer money generating bustle.
According to Pakistan Medical Association, for the scores of one thousand three hundred and seventy patients, there exists a single doctor in Pakistan. The dearth of doctors instead, has flourished a business with abnormal profit.
The rural society, as always, has been the most vulnerable victim of the made-legalized medical cartels. We mostly have undeserving candidates flocking in the medical colleges due to feudal and political pressures and naturally they turn out to be unethical doctors. The stern competition in pharmaceutical companies has brought green anticipations for doctors in the shape of cash or kind. Many of the lucrative offers to the doctors such as air-tickets, picnics, visits, dinners, renovations, cash payments and demanded gifts like a would-be son in law demands for dowry, to give the medicine companies their maximum sale is a typical tradition.
To get the insight, I met different doctors and told them about my fact-finding pursuit. One of them beamed exposing his incisor as a notion of telltale instincts our doctors exhibit every now and then. On the promise of concealing his identity, he discloses many facts that put a stigma on the curing messiahs of our country, of course with exceptions of few. According to him, the Government provides funds for the machines for ECG, MRI, C.T scan tests and incubators etc, but the same machines including the hospitals amenity articles are always asked from the hungry-for-sale pharmaceutical companies having used the provided funds from the Government’s behalf. “A quota of basic needed medicines like pain-killers is a Government provision but either you don’t find these in our free stores or if given, a minor amount is charged or you are a lucky poor patient to get them and is always considered complimentary” he added.
To my great surprise, a family doctor after being pledged about his veracity, pronounces that some doctors are running their own promotional medicines and they are at liberty to prescribe them: High dosages, higher quantity for the highest sales of their medicines. Furthermore, giving antibiotics of extreme generation for minor requirements or settling it with a capsule worth eighty rupees, where a same salt of rupees five can serve the cause.
Many of us have experienced how laboratories have the monopoly over certain clinics and doctors. They suck your blood and charge you whereas if you have undergone the same test in some other laboratory, they flatly rebuff it. It did not astonish me enough to find it out in my search, that a certain amount of commission or percentage is gone to the doctors’ kitty for referring the patients over a variety of tests, few of them for sure, unjustified formality. According to a medical technician, doctors don’t hesitate to admit the patients, pediatricians for instance, to drip the Glucose that is sometimes a pretension of graving the apparent disease of the patient. A senior RMO let his tongue slip to the fact that there are many medicines including painkillers, antidepressants or muscle relaxing pills that are given additionally, to keep the sale flowchart in the brain, without even a tinge of necessity to the laymen which has nothing to do with the established disease, and has no other side effects on the healing patient too, but just to make his medical budget out of his economic domain. He also reveals in his whipering tone that many times the victims of minor rolling gas are operated for appendicitis and hernia and even a non-medical student knows that removal of appendix can be safely performed without its operable nature that is medically called ‘grumbling appendix’.
Conjuring up a pity patient travelled for hundreds of miles due to a simple problem made serious and in the operation theatre, running with financial hardships is extremely painful and in the borderline cities such as Quetta and Peshawar where patients from Afghanistan are given heaps of drugs, or more formally, medicines, to get the maximum out of them totally forgetting the sacredness of the profession as many of our countrymen have, on the sole monetary thirst that tends to give an impression: No lunch is a free lunch and subsiding the geastures of human service occupation.
The writer does not polish all the doctors with the same brush, but those who come under any of the criterion mentioned above, should at least shake their conscience hoping against the hope to break its slumber. Conventionally, we also have a psychological leanings to get pampered by a doctor with good bit of medicines and fees, to set our minds at ease that we have consulted a doctor as I believe that most part of the disease is cured with mental conviction. The word ‘Hospital’ is derived from ‘Hospitality’ and in hospital, I would be half-cured when someone listens to me and provides me an environment that is based on social service as we see in many of the countries which still have their onus on rehabilitation rather than abnormal profit generation.
