"Hi, I'm Dr. Nisa, and I'll be treating you today. How you're feeling? Do tell me your problem."
Is how I imagine all doctors would say when they see a patient. Polite, all smiles, ready to face anything.
Unfortunately I learn my skills in India. Here, they don't exactly teach social skills or medical ethics. I'm sure the ethics is there somewhere in the curriculum syllabus but in the real life of an Indian MBBS student? Totally unheard of.
I've seen doctors treating patients, their manners vary depending on the patient's social status. If it's a poor patient, they'll shout like nothing in the heavens and the earth could hear, because "they're uneducated anyway. It's a waste to talk nicely to them. You should start shouting at them." If it's a high class patient I guess if the patient asks to wipe their ass after they went poo poo also they'll do it with their bare hands. The ass-kissing I witnessed here is totally unbelievable. Tsk tsk tsk.
I study in the not so urban part of India. It is common to see patients below the poverty line, coming barefooted, probably the last time they took bath was 3 days ago, clothes all filthy and dusty from the journey they took, coming from remote villages at late stages of the disease, hoping to get free medical attention from the town doctors. I understand that it won't be comfortable for us doctors to treat them because of their appearances, but we are doctors. We are here to treat, not to complain. But most doctors here release their frustration onto the patients by shouting and treating them not-so-nicely just because how they look like (or smell like. Whichever is more overpowering.)
The poors treat doctors like gods. So much for boosting the doctor's ego. At the outpatient clinic patients are asked to leave their footwear outside the clinic, while the doctors happily tramping around in theirs. I couldn't find the logic in this, cz my shoes really aren't dirt-repellant, as far as I know. Once, when I discharged a patient, the patient, a very old lady, came and kissed my shoes. I was really surprised and upset cz really in my culture, I'm the one who should kiss her hand while biding goodbye. Once a patient's relative followed me around the ward just to give me some money for breakfast, even though I refused again and again. It's so heartbreaking for me to see them worshipping doctors so much, while some doctors see them as merely work which need to be finished off as soon as possible. I think that's less than human.
The nurses shout even louder. I wonder how the heart disease patients survived in their vicinity, cz really, their shouts are like thunders. Once I told my co-intern that I won't ever shout cz if I do the same in my own country, I might be sent straight to jail. She laughed and said yeah well we're lucky the patients here are quite immune to loud noises.
One of the most annoying thing is when patients mistook the doctor as a nurse. Here nurses are called 'sisters' or 'brothers'. I guess the blame is upon ourselves when we don't tell them who we are and jump straight to "Amma raktha pariksha marsbeku ha" (maam, i'm doing blood test now okay) or "batte bichi amma! Kelagade nodbeku nannu" (open your clothes! I wanna see your downtown.) Most annoying to me is when the doctors themselves suddenly lose all professionalism and refuses to treat/see the patients before they said sorry and shout at them that they're doctors, not a lowly nurse, so childishly as if nurses are not professionals too; without the sense at all to explain how the nurses are in an all-white uniform and doctors wear white coats over their work attire.
Oh well. It's my last 2 weeks of working here and I wish all will go well, inshaAllah. And hope all the ill-mannerism I see here won't rub off on me, and the minority of nice, ethical, truly kind-hearted doctors will prosper and never be tainted by the majority of them.
I do hope the situation will be better as the years comes.
