Click to play videoIn the time of the festival of lights, a new little Lakshmi will certainly brighten our Diwali this year.
After a 27-hour surgery by a team of 36 doctors, two-year-old Lakshmi has been successfully separated from her parasitical conjoint twin. The next 72 hours are critical for the little child.
A team of 30 doctors at the Sparsh Hospital in Bangalore successfully removed the child's extra limbs, salvaged her organs and rebuilt her pelvis area in a surgery, which was completed much before the estimated time. The doctors had earlier estimated that it could take them 40 hours.
Lakshmi is now recovering in the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital, but the real heroes of the day were the doctors, who despite all odds, made sure that Lakshmi could lead a new and better life soon.
Does that mean that – Indian doctors are better than their western counterparts?
Senior Cardiologist and Founder, Narayana Hrudalaya, Bangalore, Dr Devi Shetty; Senior Gynaecologist, Jaslok Hospital Mumbai, Dr Indira Hinduja and Associate Professor, Centre for Community Health, JNU, Dr Ritu Priya debated the issue on Face The Nation with CNN-IBN's Sagarika Ghose.
When Dr Devi Shetty was asked of Lakshmi’s operation reveal the sheer skill of the Indian doctor who doesn’t have the technology and infrastructure that a doctor from the West has, he said he endorsed that statement.
“Indians may not be better than Westerners. It’s just that we are more experienced,” Shetty remarked.
Dr Indira Hinduja supported the argument that an Indian doctor has a range of clinical experience, which result in a better diagnostic skill.
“We were capable of doing anything even though we did not have access to technology,” Hinduja said, adding that the scenario however is changing now.
But Dr Ritu Priya sounded the dissenting note. When asked if the poor actually have the kind of access to health they should, she said, “It is not because deficiency of doctors and their skills. It’s because of the systems not being in place.”
“Doctors are performing very good not just on patient care, but also demographic compassion which means they are devising systems that reach large numbers of people,” added Priya.
Is there argument that a lot of Indian doctors are selling out to commercialism?
“It is an exception. Most Indian doctors are compassionate,” Shetty said.
There are approximately 1,20,000 overseas doctors in the US. The largest single group of foreign doctors is from India – 25,000. There are an estimated 80,000 overseas doctors in Britain and more than 27,000 are from India.
But Shetty pointed out that the boom in the Indian health care sector and opportunities are luring Indian doctors to stay back.
“Things have changed. The doctors are running back to India. The remuneration and lifestyle is beter here, “ he said.
Deficient health care system
Given the success of the doctors who have operated on Lakshmi, still many Indian doctors say that the life of a doctor is a life of frustration. There is no money, future, facilities, they aren’t given respect in society and many doctors because of the bureaucracy and the terrible state of government hospitals are forced to leave India and go practise elsewhere.
But Dr Indira Hinduja said she doesn’t think doctors are going away now unless until they are faced with certain circumstances.
“Majority of public hospitals lack upgraded technology. We require a good health care system where each citizen is given same facilities. This may be lack on part of the government,” said Hinduja.
We have heard of the tussle that is going on in All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) between the Health Minister and the head of AIIMS. We have also seen many doctors are leaving the hospital as there is because there is political lobbying going on, shortage of funds, weak administration, too many patients and frequent sabbaticals. What then needs to be done to rescue the public health care system?
“Where we fail is during the orientation that the doctors get during their medical education and the professionalisation that comes with it,” Priya said.
We are then no creating Indian doctors. We are creating doctors who only want high technology and therefore go abroad.
“The main reason why young Indian doctors leave the country is because they can’t get into post-graduate training programmes unlike the US or UK where the training programmes are open ended,” said Shetty.
He said in India the post-graduate training programmes are highly controlled. “It’s like a license raj,” Shetty said.
SMS result: Are Indian doctors better than their western counterparts?
Yes: 94 per cent
No: 6 per cent
CNN-IBN editorial: India's doctors are perhaps our country's greatest human resource. They work in unimaginably hard conditions, dealing with great numbers of patients, relying on their own clinical experience and skill in the absence of technology and infrastructure. There may be quacks, cases of medical negligence and cases of commercialism, but there is no denying that this Diwali at least as we welcome Lakshmi into our homes, we need to light a lamp for India's skilled physicians, overworked and underpaid as many many of them are.
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