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The word Pandemic instantly takes me to the days of medical school, where we studied it as if it was a fictional entity, while never expecting to implement the knowledge in practice. Metaphors sound frivolous the way things have unfurled over past couple of months.

Everyone has been affected. With so many lives lost and many families left in despair and misery, this is perhaps the most shocking crisis of many peoples lives.

While for the larger population, this disease is all about lockdowns, keeping safe, protecting families and making ends meet; its implication for doctors is multifaceted. Without any immunity from the disease and with constant threat of violence, doctors bracedfor the unseen enemy since the beginning. As our country catapulted into the deadly second wave this summer, the challenges became even more stark. What they were dealing with was a mutant virus with high infective potential, failing health infrastructure and a billion plus unvaccinated population.

But this became the period when complacence overtook good sense, thirst for power overlooked greater good and the concept of shared responsibility was binned. Conveniently ignored was the fact that we had never touched baseline of normalcy and many places in world were still battling with subsequent waves. Poor planning and unscientific outlook were recipe for disaster.

A plethora of treatment options started being circulated amongst general population on social media platforms. Where a person with no medical background is free to administer treatment, doctors are being questioned over injudicious of some drugs. Where faltering oxygen supply and drug shortage is taking lives, doctors are harassed for loss of lives due to known complications of diseases. Where propaganda alternative medicine is portrayed as a panacea for COVID, doctors are asked to prove beyond doubt the rationale behind use of experimental drugs! Doctors have been facing this disease in its most horrendous forms. They have lost loved ones too. The plight of dying patients and distraught families has left their psyches scarred. Notwithstanding all this, their hope thrives on recovery of patients. Those who serve you do not yearn to be called Warriors or God; we just want patients to understand that our every effort we make is for your well-being. Every doctor believes in Do No Harm. The disbelief towards our intent is disconcerting. And when fear rather than care and compassion becomes our guiding principle, it is death knell for the medical system.

There are thousands of diseases in the world, but Medical Science only has an empirical cure for twenty-six of them. The rest is. guesswork. These words of Erich Segal in his famous novel Doctors so aptly described the state of medical science way back in 1988. We have come a long way since then. There has been phenomenal advancement in diagnostics and therapeutics in all specialities. It is for these advances in medicine, today we have options to treat COVID patients and save lives. Researchers came up with effective vaccines in unprecedented time. Modern medicine is evidence based.

A medical practitioner selects treatment options for specific cases based on the best research, patient preferences, and individual patient characteristics. But it is not an absolute science. Drugs that are effective in some patients might be ineffective in others; treatment of choice for diseases change as more insight into pathophysiology and imaging is attained. Hundreds of hours of scientific researches and deliberations are needed to develop a drug molecule and still more to prove its safety and efficacy. It took years of massive outreach programmes to eradicate few viral diseases. And despite every effort, there are still diseases that leave us intrigued and crippled. We too look forward to the day when gene therapy would eradicate blindness in young retinitis pigmentosa patients and new treatment options will likewise emerge for diseases that are still untreatable.

We doctors have been trained on ethical and humanitarian grounds. Hippocrates never prepared us for war-like situations, but that didnt deter any doctor in these perilous times. It is ironical that anything that is on social media is accepted to be the truth, whereas every word of doctors is scrutinized. The blabbering of self-promoting, fame mongers against the noble profession is an affront to our dedication and service. The development of alternate forms of medicine doesnt mandate disregard of the existing, proven and life saving modern medicine. The myopic policies for health and collective consciousness against doctors are corrosive to the future of this nation already compromised by the wrath of COVID19. If this catastrophic period doesnt change anything, nothing ever will.History will repeat with this denial of culpability and inaction at the highest level. The blind spots in sight must not taint ones vision. Its time to prioritize health and be prepared for any incipient third wave.

Also read: SubscriberWrites: Effective mechanism needed for providing ex-gratia to families of Covid victims

These pieces are being published as they have been received they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.

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SusbcriberWrites: Covid proves that systems need to change and its time to prioritise health - ThePrint

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