Is your doctor good enough? It is not easy to answer. The currently available measures would not enable either a colleague doctor or a patient to appropriately evaluate a doctor’s worth. Despite prolonged and costly attempts, insurers and governments have not been able to accurately measure a doctor’s value. They won’t be able to do so in the immediate future. There are no available measures to capture a doctor’s worth.
A deep concern for patients is but a fundamental responsibility of a physician which wells out from the culture of the physician, which is not measurable but can be sensed only by a patient.
A sympathetic understanding of the discomforts, ailments and diseases is again based on a physician’s attitude and also the time availability in the hands of the physician. Rushing a physician to address a fixed number of patients per hour is today’s trend, which disables the physicians to gain understanding of the patients’ sicknesses.
The physicians are life-givers. They cannot be driven by financial considerations. Yet the existing medicare systems set targets for the physicians and push them to clear cases faster, to prescribe medicines and even to suggest surgeries. Like in all fields the financier presides over the helm of affairs and directs the specialists like physicians, surgeons and even scientists.
A Master of Wisdom says, “Knowledge is not in dearth amidst humanity, but knowledge is under the thumb-rule of the barbarians, the power mongers and the money lenders”.
An especially skilled physician, capable of curing most intrinsic sickness, is constrained to do so due to the economic conditioning of either the patient or the administrator or the self-economic condition. When education and health of humanity is conditioned by commercial factors, not much can be accomplished. A physician who is expected to live in harmony and promote health himself is de-settled into conflicting situations and many times holds not the free will to heal, to treat and to cure. The independence of every profession is at stake, so also for the physician, when there is predominance of governance and legislations that constrict the free play of professional excellence. Today’s medical profession is burdened with many a factor and a conscious physician cannot find the free will to demonstrate the knowledge that he holds.
Amidst physicians there are a number of stories where they experience nights of panic and triumph, caring for critically ill patients. Personally they have ‘OK’ days and days where they fall asleep with their hands on the chest, full of satisfaction. But those are the situations where the physician is unfettered of any commercial or administrative constrictions.
It is about time that the profession of health and healing is restored to its due place of honor to enable its optimal functioning.
Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash
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