Rape and Overcharge With a Smile

Three stories brewing about India's creaky, high-tech and dubiously ethical medical industry
are making me wonder if everything I have ever written that is positive about the medical care should be stricken from the record.

Cancer Patient Raped in Hospital (Tribune) - a sixteen year old cancer patient in a Bombay hospital was raped and impregnated while she was anesthetized and undergoing treatment. She never realized that she had been raped by the doctors or attendants until months later when she missed her period.

Treat Patients With Cheek:MK (Deccan Chronicle) Chief Minister Karunanidhi has come out in favor of better bedside manner in the states over crowded and ill-equipped hospitals. "It is the manner and the humane approach towards patients that bring credibility to the hospitals, not the state of the art equipment," he said. I assume this also means that doctors should, in the future, refrain from raping their patients.

"We Only Try to Provide Quality Care" (Deccan Chronicle, print only) Yesterday Vinodhini, a reporter at the DC, ran a story saying that hospitals in Chennai routinely schedule people for unnecessary tests in order to drive up corporate profits. Doctors are assigned a weekly quota for MRIs and other scans that they must sell to patients or possibly have their pay docked. This, of course, is why when a friend of mine who works at a local NGO had to take her co-worker to the hospital when she was suffering from shock was immediately carted towards the MRI machine and not immediately treated for her obvious--and potentially fatal--ailment.

Over the last year I have run several stories praising the research sector in India. Medical centers here are ahead of the curve on stem cell treatment and generic pharmaceutical manufacture, but from some reason patients are still being killed, raped and generally mishandled at even the best hospitals around the nation.

Somebody please make it stop.