THE BLIND SIDE OF THE MEDICAL PRACTICE..

A patient comes with a swelling on the left side of the mandible..he is accompnied by his wife..its a huge swelling occuring in a short span of time..the doctor examines the patient..and notices hard and fixed submandibular and juglar lymphnodes with an extra-oral pus discharge..suspecting some secondary infection..intra-orally the patient has grade 3 mobility in the posterior left side teeth..with a proliferative growth seen on the buccal side of the left side posterior teeth..the patient is a chronic tobacco chewer and has been keeping the tobacco on the left side of the mouth mostly..on examining the OPG of the patient a big proliferative lesion with a massive bone loss in the form of a huge radioluscency is seen on the left side of the mandible..ultimately leading us to a questionable diagnosis..indicating carcinoma(CA)..which needs confirmation.The site of the extra-oral draingae is cleaned with betadine solution n a dressing is given in the end and antibiotics and analgesics are prescribed.The patient and his wife is informed abt the suspected diagnosis of carcinoma, its treatment cost, abt the biopsy and the hospitals which provide the treatment.the patient takes it well, but the wife stays still fer a moment n den begins to cry,saying that how she,her family and kids cannot survive without her husband.I tried to console her, showing the brighter side of the situation and even telling her abt the recent leaping advances in medicine and sugery has made mostly every disease and defect curable..but then suddenly she asked me a question and I was taken aback..she asked me if the treatment could be free??..n how she cannot afford it,i was speechless.Even after ol da fascinating and leaping advances in sugery and medicine..we are cost bound..n i wondered if even after ol dese advances and newer treatment modalities, are we really potent enough to actually make dem useful enough fer the common people in a developing country like India??..ultimately we had to refer the patient to other hospital fer comparing the prices fer the treatment..its not jst a story of one patient..so many of such patients are still waiting to get treated..some die untreated..and this is the irony of today's so called "MEDICAL ADVANCES", which is miles away from the common people..especially in my country uptil now..its still lacking in many ways..and believe me its painful wen u knw how to treat da patient and u cannot..dats wat i called "THE BLIND SIDE OF THE MEDICAL PRACTICE"!!
i am sure we ol medical professionals can relate to it in some way..and faced atleast one such incident where u feel helpless..but i hope i was able to throw some light on this un-noticed and ignored side of our practice..m sure we can overcome it by our joint sincere efforts ..
thanx a ton!!

-Dr. Shubhra Sharma