The shame they stand for

After the shameful Lal Ded hospital episode in which a pregnant woman of a far off Kupwara village was denied and she finally delivered the baby on road, a face book user had a telling comment on the attitude and behavior of the doctors. He wrote: doctors are given medical education for five years. It would have been quite good to give them moral education for six more months. When viewed in the backdrop of daily behavior of doctors, the comment cannot be passed off as casual. It is a serious reflection on the overall medical culture which encourages assertive behavior, arrogance and a sense of entitlement among doctors. Few would dispute with the fact that behaviours (good or bad) are learnt during training and then pass on to the system. The truth is that perhaps doctors have a little right to be arrogant and assured in being right. After all, patients trust their doctors to take care of them and to have experience and competence so that they can recommend treatment and advice.

Patients follow the advice of doctors blindly. They never question the doctors’ right to be right. But the way doctors conduct themselves is most of the time questionable. There are definitely exceptions but those are very limited and restricted. Majority of the doctors are arrogant, supercilious and self-important. Lack of moral training apart, the commercialization in medical profession too is largely contributing to the bad behavior of the doctors. The greed for more and more money is hugely affecting their ethics and morals. Pharmacist and medical representatives are seen queuing outside doctors’ chambers in dozens even during not only at their private practicing shops but also in hospitals during duty hours as well. They, against monetary considerations, prescribe substandard drugs, and on occasions even identify the medicine shops where ‘prescribed’ drugs can be purchased. These doctors are also allegedly paid commission for referring patients for x-ray and other medical tests by clinics and laboratories. Kashmir is huge market for fake and substandard drugs. It is an undeniable fact that doctors are part of this criminal business. The drug control department, on occasions, takes some cosmetic measures by declaring to have cancelled the licenses of fake drug dealers. But this has also turned into a profitable business for the corrupt officials of the department. All they mean by such measures is to extract more and more money from these dealers.

A random survey in valley’s drug market can reveal this grim reality that more than half of the drug sellers and medicine shop owners do operate without licenses from the department. Corruption, of any nature, is a social evil and crime in any society. But it becomes more heinous when done at the cost of human lives. They could well be qualified as murderers and killers, who needed to be dealt with like any killer. But it is quite agonizing that the government is doing little in dealing with these criminals. The incident at Lal Ded hospital should have served as a igniting push for the government to crackdown on erring doctors since there was a human life had lost in it. The doctors should have booked for murder as the baby the lady delivered died because of the cold and lack of medical treatment. But the government went with usual business, ordering enquiry. The doctors or doctors responsible for denying admission to the lady should have been suspended and arrested till enquiry.

Government instead went in reverse gear. The most shameful is the silence of the doctors’ community. The Doctors Association of Kashmir (DAK) remains always in ready gear to protest anything that happens with the doctors. Recently, they raised every kind of hue and cry against deputy Mayor of Srinagar Municipal Corporation for castigating a doctor at SMHS. But the way they maintained silence on the death of baby at Lal Ded showed that humane cultural is missing in the entire medical fraternity.