Srinagar: Even in the first wave of the pandemic, we saw more non-Covid patients dying than the Covid patients. Many of these non-Covid patients died due to the lack of treatment as they did not come out of their homes for treatment due to the fear of getting infected.
Patients are not afraid of coming out for treatment, but they are simply refused to be treated at hospitals. This is unjust and cannot be acceptable. I have been crying since the outbreak of this pandemic that we require to treat every patient whether Covid or non-Covid with the same zeal.
Pandemic infected patients indeed should be treated on an emergency basis, however, simultaneously, we need to ensure that other departments of the healthcare system are not disrupted. How can we ignore the fact that we have more non-Covid patients than Covid patients? These non-Covid patients have to be treated as they used to be earlier.
Most importantly, let me say that the tele-consultations do not work at all. Treating patients on telephones might even land some of them in complicacies. For example, if an elderly person with a complaint of weakness contacts a doctor on phone. The doctor might suggest some tonic to the patient. But the actual cause of the weakness might be the patient’s underlying pneumonia. Since in the physical absence of the patient the doctor will not be able to diagnose the real cause of the weakness and eventually his or her inability to treat the hidden disease may cause even death to the patient. Similarly, if a pregnant woman feeling unwell would telephonically contact a doctor to try to get advice, how could a doctor be able to know whether the baby inside the womb of the woman is alive or dead? To add one more example I would say that there are some alarming symptoms of a heart attack that most people are unaware of. Sometimes people wrongly guess these symptoms as of indigestion. Only a doctor can diagnose these symptoms properly only when a patient is brought to him or her. Such patients cannot be diagnosed or treated on phones. I am sighting these examples to make you understand that the medical field is not education, which you can provide online to the students. In the online education system, even if a student does not understand what is being taught, yet he or she has a life ahead to understand it. However, in the case of online consultation, if a doctor fails to understand the problem of the patients or the patient fails to make the doctor understand his or her symptoms, it may prove fatal for the patient.
That is why I say these tele-consultations are nonsensical and thus do not work beyond a certain limit. I have also kept a helpline open to manage Covid apprehension of the people. However, that does not mean I treat patients through this helpline. That is not possible rather it could prove fatal.
Patients need physical consultation of doctors regularly to ensure their underlying diseases do not go out of control. For instance, the blood sugar level of a patient, if not monitored regularly, may shoot up at any time and eventually could cause the death of the person. Hypertension, similarly, if not treated with pace can cause stroke or heart attack. A patient with diabetes can go into a coma or can have a stroke if his treatment is ignored for some time. Even a slight shoot-up in blood sugar can land a patient into complications. Similarly, if the gallbladder of a person gets infected and is not treated by a minor surgery on time, it can cause complications or even death of the patient. People grappling with such ailments need to be seen regularly by the doctors and that too with in-person consultations.
Even patients with chronic diseases need to be treated on a regular basis. For example, a delay in the treatment of a cancer patient could prove fatal for him or her. Cancer may spread in the body of the patient if he or she is not under a doctor’s constant watch.
As far as the pandemic hit patients are concerned, nobody can deny the fact that they need to be effectively deal with. But at the same time, we need to take care of non-Covid patients while keeping the standard system intact.
Any patient, whether Covid or non-Covid, coming to the hospital should be received by the concerned department and treated well; and any patient with severe Covid symptoms or with abdominal pain, coming to the hospital running, is an emergency case and should be treated accordingly. Both can die if not treated timely.