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My soul leaps for joy each time a doctor receives a case, studies the
patient keenly and instead of scratching down an endless list of useless
drugs simply refers the patient to another doctor-not a friend cum
business partner in a private clinic or laboratory-but to someone who's
more experienced. There’s no greater proof of professionalism. The
problem is that specimens of doctors like this are rare. Lots of our docs
have been poisoned by the layman believe that doctors know it all.
Many medical practitioners have lost the humility to admit an obvious
incapacity to understand every patient’s problem-and this puts the lives
and finances of patients at great risk. Doctors, please don’t play God. You
are under no obligation to understand everything. Don’t wait for patients
to waste their entire savings before you admit, “…I do not understand…”
It is human not to know!
Also, our doctors are notorious for filling hospital books with letterless
scribblings in the name of prescriptions whose purpose we are yet to be
told. We are also yet to be told if there is a medical shorthand. Patients
have had to make numerous refund trips to the pharmacy to exchange
drugs because the MD would not write legibly.
Worse still, wrong doses have been administered due to medical
hieroglyphics! Should the abc letter-carving course at primary school be
included in the curriculum at medical schools? What are physicians trying
to hide from patients? Why is the whole thing being so mystified by those
who are supposed to enlighten others about their health? The health
milieu is not CIA, KGB or Mossad where messages come and go in codes
that need deciphering.
Policemen failed us long ago-when they connived with the public to
make bribery a shameless routine in african countries. Then teachers
followed when they dreamt up countless private classes at the detriment
of regular teaching hours at school. Then doctors, our last breath of the
noble guard are now falling too. Don’t ask me how all the people who
consult at public hospitals in the morning end up receiving cutthroat
price treatment by evening at private clinics owned by government
employed doctors-earning a salary from tax money. Africans are poor.
Doctors don’t agree with this obviously.
It’s fast becoming a sauve qui peut. Does every doctor have to run a
private clinic under a smoke screen appellation of Foundation or CIG in
order to make a living? How can docs work overnight in clinics and still
serve by day in public hospitals? What would be the quality of service
rendered after a sleepless night? Is this our version of the IMF imposed
liberalisation?
As for tradi-practitioners, let’s save them the term charlatan. It would
be an understatement. Some of these guys practice feymania in the name
of traditional medicine. They are conmen! My shock of the year has come
from a tradi-practitioner. I came across a leaflet from the offices of a
famed herbalist advertising a drug that cures 200 diseases.(This should be
an excellent contender for the Guinness Book Of Records!) If this does
not amount to insanity, a bigger lie will not be told this decade.
Funnily though in this country, someone lies about the president and he
is arrested. A man fabricates a lie-a 200 disease cure drug-that can ruin
the lives of 200,000 people and he’s strolling freely. Freeier than the birds
that fly in the air. How could a person be suffering from 200 diseases and
still walk this old earth? His place would have long been in the soil. Let’s
suppose you are suffering from 9 diseases and you opt for the so called
200-disease-cure. Won’t you be taking medication for 191 other diseases
for which you are not suffering? Why would you be taking treatment for
something you do not suffer? I also wonder how many physicians in the
whole wide world can stand up and name two hundred diseases at a blow.
But somehow, someone has found the cure for 200 diseases (including the
ones he does not know) and put the cure in one bottle. Doctor-if truly
you are one, show your human face. Ignorance shouldn’t be a crime. Save
the ignorant african. Withdraw the utopic lie. Show your human face.