On the 30th of April, right after the Bihar Low-cost videofest, I was admitted to Holy Family Hospital, Kurji with severe renal colic, this post springs from a weird experience I had there…

I belong to the generation whose parents spent a great deal of time instilling ‘up-bringing’ into. Along the way we picked up certain notions that are being severely tested these days. One of them is that you can rely on whatever the doctor says, because a good doctor always works in the best interests of his patients.

Another belief that has been taking a beating is that the doctors in the good old mission hospital are doughty pioneers who do their best to serve their patients, not for filthy lucre, but because they respond to a higher calling. The good Lord knows that in the many summers that I have roamed this earth, I have had the great good fortune to have benefited from the ministrations of such angels in the shape of human healers – Dr Anne Neidfield MMS, Dr Ekka, both surgeons at the Holy Family hospital at Mandar, now in Jharkhand’s Ranchi District and ‘Doctor’ Tom Gunther, an apothecary who dispensed DeChane’s herbal medicines that saved many a child from the grim reaper in those days when routine immunisation was unheard of in India – were such people. They walk the earth no more.

What does one say when they come across a doctor in a Mission Hospital whose whole purpose in treating patients seems to be to direct them towards another hospital and more expensive treatment, literally scaring them off?

This slimeball, who had responsibility for my case, confronted me with reports within 12 hours of my stay in the hospital, suggesting that the levels of certain chemicals in my blood were unusually high and suggested that there was indication of possible kidney damage and that I should waste no time in getting the latest non invasive treatment for a stone in my left kidney and also visit a nephrologist who also happened to own a “stone clinic” and a hospital. Holy family hospital, he warned, did not have the competency…. Strange, I thought, because I had received very satisfactory treatment for stones in my right kidney from this very hospital almost twenty years ago …. Being the suspicious creature that I am, I did some quick checking up using my mobile phone, to find out that the particular joint he was trying to pack me off to was his favourite on the referral list, and some other patients had not-good experience there. And very curiously, I found out that the calculus was not in my kidney, and that the particular chemicals that were ‘abnormally high’ were so because of the extreme pain I was in when the tests were taken.

I immediately switched to another surgeon, a Doctor Hamidi who had butchered me before, when my appendix ruptured in the 90’s and had done a pretty good job of putting me back on the road. Guess what, a second round of tests showed that the chemical balance was normal, so IVP could be performed – what a relief, my kidney wasn’t damaged, and I left the hospital with choices, all information provided by the doctor so I can decide for myself what to do with the calculus bouncing around inside.

It’s a pity that today’s mission hospitals have few medical men with vocations, merely lots of younger ‘career doctors’ who are time-servers … wonder what will happen when the old guard, the practicising professional stalwarts hang up their stethoscopes?