Book by city-based doctors unwraps unethical practices

Dr Rajendra Malose, a general practitioner from Nashik, however, is blunt when he points out that doctors get Rs 30-40,000 just for referring a patient for angioplasty. Dead patients continue to be kept on ventilators, until the anger of their relatives cool off, he says. As soon as an accident takes place on the highway, seven or eight persons go running to the site and take charge. “Is it a good or a bad thing that they promptly take such patients to orthopaedic wards of corporate hospitals?” he asks.

These revealing testimonies of 78 doctors from various parts of the country about the reality of private medical practice in India has been compiled in a book authored by Pune-based Dr Abhay Shukla and Dr Arun Gadre. It will be released on February 26 at AIIMS in New Delhi. The book is an English translation of the Marathi one — Kaifiyat pramanik doctoranchi (reflections by sincere doctors).

It contains interviews of 78 practicing doctors from Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore and Chennai. “These whistleblower doctors have mustered the ethical courage to expose facts for the first time on such a scale,” Dr Arun Gadre says.

Several doctors spoke up including Dr Vijay Ajgaonkar, senior diabetologist from Mumbai, who says, “Now our greed has increased to the extent that when a patient of one consultant goes to another consultant, the second one prescribes the same medicine, but merely changes the brand to show that he is doing something different. And it is true that this profession has now become completely commercial.”

Huge corporate hospitals and multi-speciality hospitals are growing in number. These organisations put pressure on all the doctors linked to the hospital and on their full-time doctor employees.
“Unnecessary investigations are then forced upon the patients,” says Ajgaonkar. Dr Shyam Kagal, a city-based physician, says that in the past he was attached to a certain hospital where the management told him plainly that to continue work he would have to admit a certain minimum number of patients every month.

Dr Sanjay Gupte, a city-based gynaecologist and ex-national president of FOGSI, hit the nail on the head saying corporate hospitals want only those doctors who can help them to earn more money. “As a result, doctors who practise ethically cannot last there. I know of a hospital where if the patient is charged Rs 1,50,000, the doctor gets a mere Rs 15,000. Ninety percent of the income goes into the corporate coffers,” he adds.