I script this essay principally to register my disquiet about the rise of a new class of practitioners of surgery in the province of Indian Medicine. In case I choose to describe them ‘Itinerant Surgeons’, that phrase will not be an absurd misnomer since these gentlemen like pub crawlers in the British Isles tenaciously hop from one nursing home to another for their daily sustenance. Through their imperious pomposity, neo-rich traits and indecorous conduct they felicitously attract yet another suitable descriptive phrase – medical oligarchs.
Let me pen a profile of the itinerant surgeons for you. A lot of commonalities seem to glue them; the common denominator being their insatiable appetite for material wealth. Evidently hailing from affluent backgrounds they embraced their pecuniary tastes early in their lives and subsequently spent considerable sums acquiring degrees and allied appurtenance to gain consultory perch. They lack in liberal and egalitarian impulses and remain mostly destitutes of any ingrained decent traits. The description ‘desiccated tissue mechanics’ suits them most agreeably.
They are wary of interacting with their patients directly; the nursing homes or hospitals they serve recruit and pigeonhole the patients for them. The treatment strategies are fixed on minimal data transmitted electronically the previous evening.
They set out of their expansive abodes early in the morning after loading the dicky of their awesome limousines with equipment and seek out their first nursing home. By the time these stalwarts reach the hospital premises, their patients enfeebled by anaesthesia are already deposited on the operation table.
Because of mutually salutary commercial transactions companies adore them. Drug companies seek them out, tend and sustain them with unwearied and unflinching constancy and devotion. At their behest the itinerant surgeons fly to exotic locales, shop at Harrods and Marks & Spencers and frolic in the ethereal innards of the Star Cruise. They are of course, not averse to being entertained at the gilded balcony of Lido or Moulin Rouge.
There is no doubt that the commercial alignment of itinerant surgeons with dubious hospitals is very toxic and there is no visible limit to the harm it might do. It liquidates many of the ordinary guarantees to the patient which our civilized society proffers. It abridges and abrogates her rights of choice and other prerogatives.
It is disconcerting that even the magisterial MCI has not registered in such defilements and pass them over with careless inattention. Other professional groups including the formidable IMA blinded by their own agendas remain supine onlookers without providing any palliation. In fact all regulatory mechanisms seem to have given the itinerant groups carte blanche.
I suppose it is time that the general public take cognizance of these distortions and clean up the sullied Indian medical landscape. The consultant-patient interaction ought to represent a transparent human relationship. It endorses human values and above all the patients’ right to know. It furthers medical equity.
(The author is BC Roy award winner)
