Obs N Gyn

A nineteen year old girl, twelfth pass, pregnant for the first time, and visiting a private maternity home regularly for ante natal checkups landed finally in painful breast abscess ten days later she delivered her baby. It was because of retracted nipple and the maternity home doctor might have forgotten, or neglected, or was just unaware of the fact that the breasts should be checked at the first visit. She was a registered practitioner holding some diploma after her undergraduate, and she had failed to take care of her patient and had made her and her kid to suffer a lot for such a simple reason. It was simple to diagnose, simple to treat, and unfortunately so simple that she neglected.


It could be a good medico legal lawsuit to appeal against her, but the village dwelling new mother feared the court. And the culprit doctor was left unpunished, free to neglect her other patients…


This happens here, many times. The patients don’t know the roles of doctor and same is true for the doctors. In fact we doctors are trained to neglect… not in the books mentioning some strange combinations of words and numbers as laws, in fact we’re supposed to mug up those laws without knowing the meanings.


We’re trained to neglect in the exams. As undergraduate students we must know that we should examine the breasts… and we must not examine them while examining the patient lest the ‘case’ shall become complicated, lest we shall fall short of time for reading… lest we shall lose the patient compliance. We’re supposed to write ‘All is well’ in our report or case history and examination, no matter what the reality is. We must must must modify the case in order to make it simple, banal or… digestible to the examiner. Then we pass in the exams and grow up as real doctors… only to follow the ‘all is well’ tradition. We need not examine the patient thoroughly we should not… we should not trouble ourselves, to take pains to see the nipples in this ‘case’. The patients are unaware many times… and they fear the court, most of the times they don’t even know that such laws do exist.


And we make money, increase the hospital building, take more and more patients… and increase our capacity of neglecting. Because one time or other in our lives we were medicos and we can’t forget the impressions left in our minds by the exams… the things supposed to be the only purpose of our lives as medicos. We never wanted to be doctors… we wanted to be businessmen and obstetrics and gynecology is the most lasting and profit giving business… it never stops even though in the society there isn’t any illness.