My friend who lives in Bangalore who has a fast and strenuous lifestyle like any other IT professional. He had some stomach ache and lack of appetite for few days. On a similar occasion a year back he did have an incident of losing consciousness for a few minutes. He was worried and called me to take him to a hospital.
I called up few hospitals nearby and found out that the nearest point to a gastroenterologist and located one at Apollo hospital Bannerghatta road.
We went there and registered at the counter and waited for the doctor for nearly an hour. There was a huge queue. Finally our name was called and to our disappointment it was to an antechamber where a junior doctor took the details about my friend’s problem while in parallel talking over mobile phone. He was not interested in what we gave as inputs but rather had a set of questions which apparently he had the answers too because he finished writing the report before the conversation was over.
We were asked to wait outside to have the final dharshan of the main doctor. After a while we found the main doctor walking out and we rushed and interrupted him to find out our fate. He remembered the name and told he had advised us to go for a scan of the abdomen and then come for an endoscope procedure the next day. Overall charges will be around a few thousands. When I asked him why he require a scan and an endoscope he was considerate enough to suggest scrapping the scan and insisted on endoscopy.
My friend decided to take some omeprazole tablets for the next week which completely cured his illness and was back in normal form.
If my friend would have been a less literate person, he would have gone for a small clinic and the doctor would have suggested any antacids or omeprazole for a week and then took action based on the result.
Upper the value chain we spend more and get less or get worse. This is the shame that we have in our heath care sector. Exploitation is not the right word. We have to coin a new word for exploitation by making us believe that we got a great deal. The most unfortunate thing is that this is spreading to middle and low income access health clinics as a better business model.
Affordable Healthcare is a dream as of now.
1 comment:
As a doctor, I feel, part of the "exploitation" is due to the attitudes of the patients themselves. You render the same treatment in tier two or three cities, as they would get in a metro. They would tend to trust the "big city" doctor.
Incresingly there is reduced space for those interested in fair, ethical and evidence based medicine.
At the higher end, people need corporate like health care,; at the lower end, quacks or quack like doctors rule.
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