We asked our daughter's friend, who shares a flat with a couple of other girls, to come and stay with us as she was not too well. When her fever would not go away, I dropped her at the outpatients department (OPD) of a nearby corporate hospital to consult a good physician. Then came the phone call. While in the queue to register, she felt giddy as the fever had shot up. She was promptly taken to the emergency ward and put on drip to administer paracetamol, so that it took immediate effect and brought down the fever.
We panicked, not because we were seriously worried about her condition, but what it meant to land up at the emergency ward of a corporate hospital. Before you knew it, they would admit her, put her through a dozen tests, have a dozen consultants see her, and when she would be discharged in a couple of days as there was nothing seriously wrong with her, she and her parents would be down by thousands of rupees.
Thankfully, the doctor, when he saw her, did not recommend admission but asked her to come the next day and undergo several tests. The list included a couple of tests that had been performed days ago - one by a very reputed laboratory! If you land up before a doctor these days, the first thing he will do is order a plethora of tests (clinical skills died some time ago) and indicate that you get them done at a laboratory he can "trust". And if it is the OPD of a corporate hospital, then, of course, it has to be done there itself.
This came close on the heels of the troubles afflicting a relative over 80 who has difficulty moving about. A succession of doctors - general practitioner, orthopaedic, gastroenterologist and even psychiatrist - who could be persuaded to come home had seen her. But we were nowhere near a clear diagnosis. Then we consulted a top city doctor (a close relation) connected with a leading hospital whether we should admit her to a hospital where some leading specialist could come and see her.
What he advised us was a revelation. "Try not to get into the clutches of such institutions and the doctors attached to them. You may or may not eventually get a proper diagnosis, but most certainly you will end up paying a fortune in diagnostic tests, consultants' fees and room charges." And then came the clincher. "She may even pick up an antibiotics-resistant hospital infection that is becoming more and more common."
This was not the first time I had heard of the dreaded hospital infection. An ageing family friend was narrating his recent brush with a medical emergency. He had to be hospitalised but was lucky. Why? "Thank god, they did not put me into an intensive care unit (ICU). Once you get into one of those, you run a high risk of picking up a hospital infection." In all these instances, it was not the actual ailment but the fear of being fleeced or being afflicted by something that you did not have in the first place (hospital infection) that was paramount.
How widespread such feelings were hit me when the wife and I recently saw the film Khaad by the acclaimed director Kaushik Ganguly. It uses a fairly conventional device of a group of people isolated from others - in this case tourists stranded overnight in a jungle by a road accident - and thereby forced to come to terms with each other and, more importantly, the demons within themselves. In a series of confessions coaxed out of them by a fellow traveller priest, they reveal terrible secrets that the world around them have not known. The stories, handled well, made for compelling viewing.
Among the tourists was a well-established doctor and his companion. She was not his relation, as was earlier made out, but a smart escort and he was not on his own holiday but one paid for by a pharmaceutical company. I thought if such a narrative has become so common in our society that a film director picks it up along with other typically ones like a retired teacher confessing to once taking liberties with a young female student, then it says something about how doctors are viewed today.
When the better-off fall ill, the topmost worry is often not how serious the illness is but the thought that one might be ripped off by a greedy bunch of professionals who have traditionally occupied a very respected position in society. Nobody thinks much of the moral integrity of a corporate hospital, but if I were a doctor, I would be worried. The dada whose advice my father valued the most on all matters, not just medical, was a family friend and renowned physician, a contemporary of B C Roy, who worked with a stethoscope and little else.
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