I am writing this post after viewing the episode of Satyamev Jayate about healthcare, in which aamir wrongly just focuses on doctors....maybe just to sensationalize things coz doctors are bunch of people who common man is gonna interact with and they are just easy targets....common man isnt going to interact with pharma companies or medical school owners...there are numerous flaws and points overlooked in this episode which are done intentionally or unintentionally...and yes i am eligible to comment on this coz I am from medical fraternity....
some things said on show were true....and must not be done like cut practices/commissions,scaring patients into procedures,and blatant over investigating....and some bad apples do that....and i agree shouldnt be done....but it is wrong to generalize it to most of medical community...
these days more number of investigations are done than before for various reasons....1) they are available, lot of currently done investigations werent available some years back....2 )doctors are afraid of getting sued and hence prescribe more investigations than they would have ten years before just to be on safe side....3) patients insist on them..
there is a fine line between more investigations and blatant over investigations..
also the stories about transplants....i dont know if they are true or fake... in reality there is a long list of people on the transplant list...you wont get a liver or kidney even if you need it immediately....and so no one would do a pancreas transplant just coz it was available....i really dont know...were the doctors quacks...or maybe aamir could do a show if there are organ transplant scams!!!!!
coming to next topic which he simply touched upon the fringes...which is an episode worth of story in itself...is about medical college scams..donation seats....and admission scams...OMG i have personally gone through the hell of medical school admissions...and something needs to be done about it...there are scams in medical admissions...seats are not shown to merit students when vacated and then after the admission deadline is past, the seat is shown vacant and then converted to donation category and sold for lakhs of rupees....and yes, its sad but true that colleges in order to get MCI certification brings in false patients and doctors and not only that, false lawns and trees too!!! colleges do a lot of false things to get more seats, and certifications....and so this underhanded deals of colleges and MCI should be exposed....and btw who are the owners of these colleges...who can it be except our POLITICIANS...
why is government not opening more colleges...why is medical college education becoming so expensive even to merit students....yes the private colleges demand loads more money from merit students....so where do intelligent students who want to become selfless doctors go???? why are there not enough PG seats in our country??? why do people have to spend lakhs of money in donation seats...why are such seats available???? who is benefitting from that money??? whose coffers are getting filled??? why isnt anyone asking this question and searching for answers to this???
then comes drug cost....firstly i want to make it clear, that pharma companies recover their research and development cost from selling their medicines...so crores of rupees are spent before they get one drug which is effective and can be sold in market...and then loads of money is spent on getting approvals from FDA and such agencies before it can be sold in market....here i am not siding with them, just making it clear that unlike said on the show, marketing cost (money spent on doctors) is not what raises the cost....what raises the cost is this R & D cost...and secondly, i am not really sure if generic drugs have same quality as these branded drugs...one of the reasons listed for inability to eradicate TB from india is poor quality of drugs....so my advice to my friends and family who can afford medicines is so buy branded ones....yes i know indian brands are less expensive than multinational brand...buy indian medicine...but buy medicines of a drug company you can trust...
next thing i want to add is....every company has a given marketing budget...they advertise, pay celebrities and get your attention...same thing is done by these drug companies..they dont bribe the doctors...nor doctors ask commission for prescribing drugs...at least most dont...again there are bad apples who maybe doing it..
there are loads of issues with indian healthcare system of which doctors too are victims....they are victims when they try to take admissions in MBBS and PG...then coz the colleges are corrupt and MCI is too, which leads to colleges having much more medical seats than they have patients....so the medical students do not get enough practice as much as it is needed....the living conditions of post graduate medical residents is simply HELL etc etc....
the problem with this episode was aamir kept of targeting doctors instead of problems within healthcare system and after watching the episode a common man will go home thinking that all the problems with the healthcare system are because of doctors and he is going to look at any doctor he knows with suspicion...
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