Doctors’ moral improvement can raise treatment standard

That the morality of doctors in our country has greatly fallen down is known to all, specially the patients and their relatives.

Even spending a great deal of money one may not be able to get the right kind of treatment in our hospitals and clinics.

Some doctors are like butchers, they never let go of an opportunity to earn bucks in the name of treating patients.

Not long ago, it was revealed that if the doctors become morally strong, patients’ medical expenditure will come down by 30 per cent.

This confession came from the mouth of the country’s top doctors themselves.

The modern view of doctor-patient relationship is that of an engagement where the patient is a participant like the doctor himself.

Here comes the question of the dignity of the patient: he has to be treated as a partner of the engagement, not as someone sitting below the pulpit of the doctor who is highly venerated.

Doctors are indeed respected members in every society because of the very nature of their profession.

But why blame only the doctors; everywhere morality has taken a nosedive: politicians, bureaucrats, law professionals including judges, teachers and journalists — all have lost their faith in morality that it alone can make them happy.

People in general believe that money can get them everything in this consumerist time of ours and the rat race has started to earn more and more money, even sacrificing all established norms and practices of morality.

Physicians have to recover their lost status as healers.

They have to understand they are not there just to cure the patient from diseases, they have to heal the patients, morally and spiritually as the holistic medicine aims to achieve.

But problems persisting in Bangladesh’s medical service are far greater.

Here the doctors are not only fake, the professionals with genuine medical degrees prescribe more drugs than required, give wrong drugs to, collect commissions from the testing laboratories and advise unnecessarily more tests to increase their volume of commission.

Moreover, public health professionals practice in private clinics and get students admitted into private medical colleges in exchange for money.

Once the doctors themselves recognise that unholy practices by medical professionals are ruining the health service as well as their reputation, we can hope the positive change will come.

Only the doctors themselves can change the moral landscape of their profession, because they understand their profession more than anybody else.