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 arguing 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 must think ten times when working continuously for 10-13 hours at the emergency ward.”
Dr. Anjali
Though Delhi enacted a new law in 2008 that prohibited violence against medicare professionals, assault on 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 once or twice, but nothing came out of that institutional FIR.” Violence and verbal abuse are commonplace struggles at Delhi’s RML Hospital, where Dr. Anjali has worked for the past few years. At Hindu Rao Hospital, doctors are worried about the shortage of medicine stocks. “We are running PG courses here and 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 in critical condition. “One serious patient entered 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 hospital marshals, 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-masked study is misleading, even useless, when 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 various modalities must work together to produce healing.
Equally important is the understanding that this diversity of causes and cures occurs in individual patients, no two alike in psychology, family medical history, and biochemistry. Two men who 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-masked method cannot accommodate this degree of medical complexity and variation, yet these are physiological facts of life. Any approach claiming to be scientific that has to exclude this much empirical, real-life data from its study is not true science. In a profound sense, the double-masked method cannot prove alternative medicine is effective because it is not scientific enough. It is not broad, subtle, and complex sufficient to encompass alternative medicine’s clinical realities. On the double-masked study to validate alternative medicine, you will be doubly blind about the existence of treatment.
