Hundreds of doctors are sued annually and medical licenses canceled for life. Though these blatant actions can never revive mankind, they at least provide a controlled environment in which human error due to neglect and miscalculations are penalized. A proper and controlled hospital system will always keep the doctors on their toes, improve medical processes, hone surgical procedures, give birth to new technology and drive easier methods to diagnose disease and ailments.
Man can now rest assured that his life will be given the due attention if at any time his heart beats stop or his body shivers into a state of perplexity. Maybe one of the reasons behind the exponential increase of health care in the United States is that they realize that the human spirit and mind is something worth cherishing. America is the only country in the world where a handicap can become a president and a black man whose father once toiled the fields is elected. It is a world that commits its solemn pledge to mankind and hopes and believes that each child has in him the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln and the drive of Thomas Edison. Each child has the opportunity to become a hero. Each individual is priceless. Anybody saved might have the cure for AIDS, cancer or rebuild America. Is that not something worth a national commitment?
Pakistan has an abundance of children laying aimlessly in the streets and dying each day of malnutrition. Hundreds of people die without a root cause and are buried under the precipice of religious dialect. Pakistan has one of the highest malpractice deaths in the world. The major cause is that there is no control on the hospital methods. The ministers of Health have either constructed their own pharmacies or ensured that their relatives have become permanent employees of the government institutions. Any minister ready to challenge this? Can anyone give me an example of a hospital that has ever suspended its doctors due to malpractice and shun the worst root cause of death- human stupidity?
I don’t believe that Pakistan realizes what dies each day. It is not another innocent bystander or another poor soul. That boy perishing away in the hospital due to the fake medicines could have been another Allama Iqbal or even Tariq Bin Waleed. That girl who died yesterday since no one attended her in time could have been the next prime minister of this nation and rebuilt it. But why do we not see these stars shining and believe in the spirit of Pakistan? Who has allowed us to bury our tomorrow? Our priceless heroes die each day whereas our villains are kept alive. Why would any nation do this?
My father walked to the Punjab Medical Institute. He was a professor at a very prestigious university in Pakistan. They wrongly diagnosed him and gave him the wrong injection. His liver ruptured and that was the last day I had with my father. That day I had met him again after coming home from work. This time he was sleeping and could not hear me. Imagine how my soul felt. Imagine how my world dissipated. These doctors had no remorse. My shouts and screams did not have any effect on the staff at the institute. Now I realize that hundreds of men and women shout at them each day and they have become prone to it. We can only voice our anger. There is no institute or governance where we can show them the pieces of the puzzle and suspend the licenses.
Punjab Institute of Cardiology killed my father three years ago. That doctor has now been promoted. Though he had apologized once he realized that we were influential people but the sad part is that there is no verdict for malpractice. My father walked to the hospital. Not on a wheel chair or in an ambulance. But walked by himself with a smile embarked on his aged petal lips. Do you know of any hospital that kills its patients that walk in?
I told my stories to my friends. Hundreds of new stories were communicated to me in tears and sad hearts. Someone had a similar incident. A nurse had given an overdose of sleeping pills to my neighbor’s sons who died at 18. My aunt’s father died after he was wrongly diagnosed for cancer. My friend’s mother died in service hospital since it was a strike and the doctors did not attend. I have kept all the stories in a dairy.
I will publish this book one day. But till that day, I write this story with an empty heart. What can we do? Should we burn the hospitals and shoot the doctors on our own? Should we create the institutes of governance? But how? The ministry of Health is heedless of this story. It has been sent to them multiple of times and still we see our tomorrow being injected with wrong medicines and people dying without a cause.
Each day Pakistan will kill its stars of tomorrow. If Pakistan had saved my father, he would have taught another generation. He might have met his grandchildren. Maybe my angel could have met her grandfather instead of staring at his pictures. Maybe I could have had time to say I love you and given him hope and love. Maybe the hundreds of people like me could have had another moment of solace and tranquility. Can I blame my country for the death of my father? I have written a poem for my father; please visit my blog http://buildpakistantogether.blogspot.com/ for reading the poem.
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