Despite being subjected to verbal abuse almost daily and working shifts that often extend to 36 hours, Dr. Anjali* is not keen to switch to private practice. In April 2019, a patient’s attendant slapped Dr. Anjali after an argument about whether the hospital was administering the correct treatment to the patient. “She was shouting as she said, ‘I can get all of you suspended within five minutes. Who do you think you are?’ She went on saying things against doctors, so I told her to be quiet. She then slapped me on my face.”
Dr. Anjali
Although she has ten years of experience as a medical practitioner, Dr. Anjali isn’t considering switching to private practice anytime soon. She is driven by a passion to serve people and takes one day at a time. “Even before having tea, we have to think ten times when we are working continuously for 10-13 hours at the emergency ward.”
Dr. Anjali
Though Delhi enacted a new law in 2008 which prohibited violence against medicare professionals, assault of doctors remains unabated. The new system of institutional FIRs in violence against doctors is also not helpful, with the police hardly making any arrests. “Law is there, but no one follows it. The accused was not called (by the police). I was called one or two times nothing came out of that institutional FIR.” Violence and verbal abuse are commonplace struggles at Delhi’s RML Hospital, where Dr. Anjali has been working since the past few years. At Hindu Rao Hospital, doctors are worried about the shortage of medicine stocks. “We are running PG courses here, and we don’t have medicines for loose motions and vomiting.”
Dr. Rahul Choudhary, President, Hindu Rao Resident Doctors’ Association
Dr. Choudhary, who has been practicing medicine since 2011, claims that the hospital is not well-equipped to handle patients who are in critical condition. “One serious patient came into the emergency ward with chronic stage-V kidney disease. This patient immediately needed the ventilator, but in our emergency ward, no ventilator is available.”
Dr. Rahul Choudhary, President, Hindu Rao Resident Doctors’ Association
Poor infrastructure is one of the main reasons behind the friction between doctors and patients’ attendants. Even though the Delhi government has announced that it will appoint marshals in hospitals, the question remains: How will an additional layer of security help these crippling health institutions? Although taken without critical examination to be the gold standard of modern science, the double-blind study is actually misleading, even useless, when it is used to study alternative medicine. We know that no single factor causes anything, nor is there a “magic bullet” capable of single-handedly reversing conditions. Multiple factors contribute to the emergence of an illness, and multiple modalities must work together to produce healing.
Equally important is the understanding that this multiplicity of causes and cures occurs in individual patients, no two of whom are alike in psychology, family medical history, and biochemistry. Two men, both of whom are 35 and have similar flu symptoms, do not necessarily and automatically have the same health condition, nor should they receive the same treatment. They might, but you can’t count on it.
The double-blind method is incapable of accommodating this degree of medical complexity and variation, yet these are physiological facts of life. Any approach claiming to be scientific which has to exclude this much empirical, real-life data from its study is clearly not true science. In a profound sense, the double-blind method cannot prove alternative medicine is effective because it is not scientific enough. It is not broad and subtle, and complex enough to encompass the clinical realities of alternative medicine. If you depend on the double-blind study to validate alternative medicine, you will end up doubly blind about the reality of medicine.
