News of what is wrong with our healthcare keeps surfacing from time to time and reports of unethical and corrupt practices amongst doctors have now become commonplace. Though one could argue the situation with medicine is not much worse than other walks of life, as a doctor, I feel compelled to at least set my house in order. Yes, a lot of the doctors today indulge in unethical practices but we don’t pass out of medical colleges aiming to become such a doctor. What then is the reason that many doctors cannot practise ethically in contemporary India?
In this book, I have resisted the temptation to simply list the gory details and ask doctors to become more honest. Such an attempt would not be very successful in our society where corruption has become a way of living and any attempt to fight it is usually dismissed as impractical idealism. This book would have been incomplete without a comprehensive list of all that is wrong and unethical within our healthcare and as a matter of necessity, I have had to enumerate them all. If patients know what is happening, they might be able to protect themselves to some extent. However, I have attempted to go beyond that and that I believe is the hallmark of this book. I have tried to examine the forces that make it impossible for a doctor to practise ethically.
Moreover, though we are quick to criticize our private doctors for their failings and there is no reason why we shouldn’t, not much time is spent evaluating the effort of our government and public sector doctors. It is almost as if it is alright to be inefficient and incompetent as long as you are not corrupt. One of these days, we will have to recognise in India that lack of action and accountability is probably the most rampant form of corruption in India and certainly the worst. The book examines our public sector healthcare provisions or lack there of.
Healthcare is a complex web where each of the players– the government, the industry, the doctors, the hospitals, and the public, have a defined role to play. In this book, I examine the steps various each stakeholder needs to take if we are to see better healthcare provisions for the people in the future. A major illness is one of the most unfortunate things that can happen to anybody. In civilized societies, we should have mechanisms to look after each other in such times of need. Doing so will preserve our social fabric and give individuals a sense of belonging. Though the task is herculean, it cannot be impossible to achieve provided we all engage in serious introspection and that is precisely what this book attempts to do on behalf of us all.
Kamal Mahawar
Author of “The Ethical Doctor” published by “Harper Collins India”
