Culture of Medicine

Last night I went to my GP with a terrible sore throat.

looked at me scrutinizing and he said Hmmm.

Well I have heard that sound so many times , on so many occasions with so many emotions and feelings and wisdom

implied into that sound that I refused to be terrified by that

noise. He pulled up his writing pad and with random emphatic scratches wrote down five medicines ! Five medicines with some valuable adv. at the end "X ray, Blood test ,uric cid test, and blood sugar test.

So for A simple sore throat a hassle of spending nearly 1000 rs.

Of course the doctor needed the fees from me and the commission from the chemists and pathologist. That's how it goes.

This is what the culture of medical ethics and the profession in our city. \

Now if I suffered from this same symptom, Sore throat, would a doctor in uganda, or lima , or a an isolated village in Cambodia suggest the same remedy , curative or therapeutic ?Would the villagers firstly bother to visit a doctor for a sore throat ? Would the medicine that works for a Delhi boy ,work for a Tasmania village boy? The answer to al the above questions are an Emphatic NO.

We all have different cultures ,our faith , our values, our sense of valid knowledge , our logic and reasoning are our culture based.

We grow up with our culture and what we believe will be good for us changes according to our cultural context. In a village

of Mongolia a simple shaman , or village medicine man takes care of all the illnesses of the community. It is believed in most part of the agrarian culture tha Dis-ease is a community illness

( surprisingly, Medical science of most advanced countries now have started to subscribe to this view )

Many stress related illness, madness,heart diseases , etc originate from the dysfunction of the society at large.An ancient Shaman used to believe that cure of an illness of an individual depends squarely on the cure of the society at large.

So in order to cure the patient questions must be asked why does one suffer from a particular illness . Who or what is to be blamed and what can we do about it.

Shall we require our doctors to prescribe toxic cughsyrup to our children or shall we see that the air my child breathes is pure which obviously needs attention of our culture. Medicine is linked to our anthropology.

Banalata Sen

For a thousand years have I paced to and fro

over the earth,

from the seas of sri lanka

to the dark night of Malay seas,

Long have I wandered

in the twilight world of Bimbisa king *

Have I been ,in a land of more distant darkness;

I am a tired soul alone

while around me foams and froths

the ocean of life,

Didn't then Banalata Sen of Natore *

offered me two drops of serenity ?

Her hair the slumberous night in the

ancient darkness of Bidsha *

Her face the carving sculpture of Sravasti *

beyond the endless sea,

The captain of the wrecked and battered ship who

before he loses all,

sees the emerald grass blowing on the far

distant sanctuary

sees with the same vision that I saw

when I beheld her in darkness.

And she said,

Where have you been so long ?

Confession

In our lives we tend to hurt others .

We hurt knowingly or unknowingly.

Some of us go to the extent of taking other's lives.

This may happen for self preservation, or to justify our ideals

or some times we kill just to protect our face in our society.

We sometimes hurt the ones we love most,and in most of those cases

we hurt ourselves more than we hurt others.

We hurt more mentally than physically.

As our society is getting more and more complicated

pressures of our society over our personal lives increase.

sometimes we do things in the spur of the moment, being overemotional,

or we do such things just to satisfy our physical needs the consequence of which

go against our whole existence.

In all these cases we are consciously or unconsciously guilty to our own psyche.

We suffer. We suffer for our deeds.

And I believe this is where we need to confess. We need to confess to ourselves.

In silence we always can pray to our inner self .

That I am sure shall wash away our sense of guilt .

In every culture throughout the world the system of confession is recommended

for psycho therapeutic needs.