The air is abuzz with more and more people expressing their disenchantment about the soaring costs of medicare in general and the hospital bills in particular. A widely circulated broadsheet has just published a feature on the plight of patients under the eye-catching caption Hospitals prefer profit over patients. At the time of formally awarding the medical degree during the annual convocation of the Universities, doctors are exclusively administered the Hippocratic Oath requiring the Physicians to treat the ill to the best of one’s ability. If the ability of a Physician to diagnose the illness and its underlying factors falls short of the purpose of seeking medicare, it calls for a detailed insight, pinpointing the shortcomings of the system of training doctors and focus on their rectification on the lines of treating illness.
In Mysuru of yesteryears with a headcount of residents less than half of what it is today, both the number of doctors and incidents of illness needing hospitalisation were a mere fraction of what they are in our times. Choice of medicines, before the ubiquitous antibiotics came, was mercifully limited. The few doctors of private clinics and Physicians in the two main hospitals then were sought by their captive families seeking medicare for their kin, known for their hasthaguna.
