I wonder why …

A couple of days back, a friend of mine posted on Facebook about a pregnant lady  who died due to the negligence of the doctor. Apparently this is a gynaecologist who has had similar cases of other patients dying during childbirth because of her negligence. The post said that she cut an important artery while trying to deliver the baby via c-section and the patient bled to death.

I don’t know of this case personally so even if I keep it aside for want of proof, we all saw recently on the never-ending-24-hour news channels about how a poor man lost his son because he didn’t have money to pay the attendant to push his son’s stretcher and that too in a government run hospital in Madurai. Apparently the story didn’t end there. The boy had severe convulsions and was brought in an ambulance for which his father had paid and then they were asked to take a slip to admit the boy which the attendant took with him when he was refused payment for carrying the stretcher and the doctors refused to attend to the boy without the slip !!! The boy died and the father had to pay to keep his body in the mortuary and then to take it to the cremation ground and then also for his last rites…..

I wonder why people study to become doctors ? I also have been hearing of the obnoxious amounts one has to pay to get admission to medical colleges …. if you pay lakhs to get admission to a medical college, then you don’t have enough marks to get the seat without any donation. If you don’t have the marks, do you atleast have the aptitude ? and the attitude to serve ? Being a doctor was once a noble profession and many of the good doctors we have encountered still practise it with an attitude of service – the patient comes first always. But this trend of turning the medical profession into a money making profession is deeply disturbing ….

Please become a doctor IF and ONLY IF you love to heal and serve the ill, not to make money. Become a business man/woman if you want to make money.

Do think long and hard about why you want admission to a medical college and become a doctor and look for a different profession if you can’t serve !!