I always tell my doctor friends, that we engineers are any day far more better thinkers and more intelligent then you doctors. It takes 5 years for a doctor to graduate out as a basic doctor and then 2 years for specialization, one year as internship and after that he gets commissioned for practising. However, as the education system is designed across the world, the doctors write exams once in 2 years for their Graduate Degree and herein the current state of modern life , where one does not remember in the evening, what he ate in the morning, where there is a chance for a person to recall, what he studied 2 years back. As a result, the doctors who graduate out are the ones routinely taught one disease to another and by the time, the graduating Doctor knows that he is now a professional, wherein 90% of the the global diseases, he can never cure during his life time and most of his patients will consider him as " Life Extension professional " then " Life Quality Professional"
He further soon realizes that the Medicines which is dispensing are the monopoly of some 20 to 30 global Drugs Manufacturing companies sitting on all the patents and the Health Management is rather a monopoly of these Drugs companies . The Doctor technically has very little to offer to his patients, other then repeating the same words umpteen times, low salt, low sugar, less oil, exercise and less stressful job. Though he himself will be totally out of weight, but will give a lecture for one hour on weight control.
Further, the real test of a Doctor comes, when he actually starts diagnosing you. The situation is that because of the Online Knowledge available, the patients are far more informed about their conditions, they have their own forums discussing the medications administered to them, the medications that have worked for them and what has not worked for them. They are also on the global alert on any new development which takes place in the remotest part of the world on their medical condition and have become a challenge to the Doctor, who is never aligned with the latest technologies and developments.
Though the standard practise is that the doctor will first send you for some ten test and when the report comes, it shows one element out of range and most others as passed. Interestingly, he then declares you as victim of a certain disease and sometimes, it will be life time chronic event.
This is where the real expertise of a Doctor evaluated. Any one can read a test report, log to the net and see what the results mean and find the answer and be happy with the doctors prescription. But the reading of a report and analyzing a report and then connecting the numbers and make a meaningful correlation is with very few and experienced doctors. lately a friend of mine went to Singapore for his medical test and his all reports came out ok, but his s.creatanine was around 4. Which is alarming. The doctor put him on CT scan, other test and yet could not find any reason as to why the creataine was 4 and GFR was 15. He declared him suffering with Gomerulo nephritis. The guy not knowing , what is it came back and checked on the web and found that he was on the way to kidney failure.
Luckily the other Doctor in Singapore, then went in ahead with his biopsy and it was found that he had malignant hypertension acute renal failure and he would recover his kidney function over time , partially atleast, if not fully.
Now, this was such a simple common sense thing , that if all the other numbers on the patients test are showing normal level, then for sure kidney cannot have a failure stage. Because it will disturb the blood elements, Na, K, Cl, it will raise the uric acid, it will have drop in Hemoglobin etc etc. Ironically the guy also had his health checked 9 months back and had found that his kidney was normal and had shown the report to this specialist. Atleast this itself should have rung bell in his head , that very unlikely that within 9 months, the kidney function will drop so much without any influence on any other blood indicator.
This is the level of expertize of a specialist Doctor and I am discussing a Doctor with more then 25 years experience. But then there was this other doctor, who corrected the mistake and bought things into order.
There is other case of a friend of mine, who was examined by a doctor for Heart Problem and he was advised, if he did not undergo By Pass surgery, he would suffer an attack anytime. He still went in to take second and finally a third advise. The Third Doctor said, he was perfectly fine and may be his reports had shown some unusual peak. Now is already more then 10 years and there is no by pass.
Another friend of mine suffered from Hypertension since early age of 30 and at around 45 , he was diagnosed with Alzheimer . Well, now let us study hypertension. The medical science since the last 2000 years has not been able to find the reason for hypertension. There are so many ,whose hypertension never gets controlled and so many who move to kidney failure, stroke, heart problem and Alzheimer .
The irony is that none of the practising doctor during the coarse of his life ever invents a medicine. It is only the pharmaceutical companies, which research and then offload the new medicines. Why would ever a pharmacy company design a medicine for a chronic disease like, Hypertension, Diabetes, Alzheimer, Parkinson and 100s more, ,wherein a patient has to have a medicine for his full life . These are commercial organizations working for profit. If all these diseases get treated with simple medications, then where is the need of life time supporting drugs and where is the profit to the shareholders.
This is where is the Big Difference between Engineers and Doctors: An Engineer will see things wrong around him, he will do everything to ensure that it is corrected, even if it means redesigning the whole system, product or machine. In Case of a Doctor, if he sees a person with suboptimal chronic condition, he only tries for his life extension. He cannot put all his study into practise and think, that at the end the human body is only cells and there is a special program in each cell which then implements the desired function. If only they could break this code and get the sick cells to either get reactivated or new programmed cells given to the person. The whole Chronic Disease thing would have been wiped out in the 19th century itself.
It is only now in the last two decades , that too animal doctors were first to find that persons own cells or embryonic cells or umbilical cord cells could be programmed to function like any other organ cell in the body. Unfortunately on account of twice veto by Pres Bush in US, these stem cells have got delayed for their executions. But finally it is Bio Engineering, Microbiology , Tissue Engineering and Gene Therapy which is taking over from conventional medical science and thankfully the old pharmacy companies will now not be able to enjoy profits from the chronic part of the human disease.
Only yesterday, I was reading about Dr Atala printing a new Kidney and Alzheimer being cured with stem cells and Diabetes II cure with embryonic stem cells being clinically tested in Singapore.
The next 10 years will be a revolution in medical science, but the winners will be not the Doctors, but the Bio Chemist, Micro Biologist, stem cells specialist, Regenerative Medicines specialist , Tissue Engineers etc etc.
I must though say, that the Surgery part of the Medical science has reached a stage of excellence. With a small key hole, the doctors do magnificent job.
Meantime, be careful of Three Dress Code : White Coat/ Black Coat / Petty Coat.
All three are major reason for Hypertension.
No comments:
Post a Comment