surely our patent's expectations are increasing & we are not able to keep in pace with that.

the recent incidence of dr couple bitten up by unhappy patients family & people of some political party is not off mind & i get to rad about a patient trying to kill a senior doctor in nasik.

patient was operated by that dr some 20 years ago for piles. he has recurrence of disease & he took out knife & hit dr in his head giving him a big cut. dr is admited in the hospital. now piles are known to recurr.

i believe that the old relation between dr & his patient is really dying. it is more of a professional approach than the personal one. and both parties are to be blamed for that. we drs for the lack of time may not be able to communicate to their satisfaction. patients today with availability of some partial knowledge & with easy availability of media & political parties have started feeling that when they go to doctor they ave to get better.

we drs are not gods & can help our patients with only available facilities. when my patients ask me about outcome of their illness i am at so much of loss. i tell them about possible outcomes of that disease & reassure them that if need be you may please call me at any odd hour of the day. i will answer your call & will try to suggest you the remedy but weather you would respond to that or no, is not in my hands.

" i treat & he cures " !!

last week in one day i had a three different experiences.
one patient came to me with extensive bilateral Tuberculosis. i examined the patient & looked at all his lab reports. after spending 15 minutes with him, i declared him having Tuberculosis. his entire family was upset with me. they felt that i should not have disclosed that he is suffering from TB. with 10 more patients waiting outside, i tried to do bet possible counseling for the disease & explained him the importance of taking regular treatment & told him that TB is fully treatable and curable disease. his son later on came to me and expressed his dislike towards me disclosing the disease to patient. i explained to him that it is very important that patient, who is not a minor, is told about his illness in details so that he understands the importance of taking treatment regularly. he felt that his father would be very upset with the fact that he is a case of TB. anyways he never came back to me.

the second patients relatives came to me before getting the patient and told me not to reveal the diagnosis to the patient. patient who is 23 years old girl about to get married. she was suffering from asthma. i did not disclose the diagnosis & she was put on treatment. she did not take treatment seriously as i was made to tell her that she has Minor lung infection. she did not start her inhalers at all feeling that it is just a small disease. she got admitted after 5 days in ICU of a tertiary care hospital in critically ill state. had she been told about her disease may be this admission would have been avoided.

the third case was elderly gentle man who came to me for some mild bronchitis. he gathered a lot of information from net on the symptoms he had. after my thorough evaluation i felt he just have mild bronchitis & told him to take antibiotics & other treatment for 7 to 10 days. but he suspected him to have lung cancer. he was so much worried that he could not sleep the whole night even after me convincing him that he does not have cancer. he had chest pain that night & had very high BP & had to be admitted in hospital. he was investigated had hyper tension due to the stress that he felt because of fear of cancer. after all sets of investigations he was discharged from hospital on 3rd day & was feeling much better.

there are many such incidences that occur daily. we have different kind of people with different personality visiting us & in that given 15 to 20 minutes it is very difficult to assess what do your patients expect from you.

diagnosing a disease is just one simpler part of the game the difficult most part is to convey that to the patient & their relatives, and we doctors many times fail there.