Our life's gatekeepers

Sickness can mean more than personal suffering and the impersonal causes it has. Medicine is not just about detecting and diagnosing the sickness. Biomedical model is essential but not absolutely sufficient to explain away sicknesses. Scientific medicine relishes in reducing sicknesses down to few symptoms and many scans. This impoverishes the spirit of medicine. Because if this process happens, there can be many aberrant modes of thinking. Two nasty ones enthrallingly enacted in the primetime serial Grey’s Anatomy on Star World…

Kevin, a braindead patient, is being treated by two interns. The surgeon-in-charge asks the interns to keep a check on his condition. One intern, Christina, begins to feel that there is no point in constantly testing the patient as he is anatomically dead. Izzie, the other intern, humanely thinks that there is still hope out there as medical miracles are possible anytime. I think even if it were a false hope, Izzie’s Spartan seriousness in the way she feels for the patient is startling.

Kevin is looked down upon as a newfound nuisance by every intern except Izzie. Even as another intern, Grey, feels that the patient’s deadline of 30 minutes is insufficient for any effective treatment; Izzie taunts Grey’s lack of humaneness by saying that we have 27minutes more to save him. A doctor is entrusted with the patient for the sole reason that there is voluntary trust in the physician. If from the start, doctors give up on the patient, they are quite unlikely to do something miraculous as their ancestors have been doing from centuries.

This aspect of treatment also wobbles us into a recent allegation against doctors: in spite of knowing that there is no hope for the patient’s recovery, they still persist so as to fill the coffers of the hospital and in turn, their own pockets. This is awfully practiced in an awesome way where the physician pools false hopes about the patient’s improving condition to stack up more bills for the hospital. This, I think is due to the lack of ethical education in medical curriculum and moreover, as professors of medicine are themselves practitioners of such terrorizing techniques of misusing patient’s plight to personal progress. They are less worried about such ethical malignant tumors they are growing in student’s brains.

In another scene in Grey’s Anatomy, Kevin’s family is traced to ask permission for donating his organs as it is now certain that he would die. His wife consents and is seated with his daughter in an instruction room where the whiteboard is sketched with surgical jargon. Christina first asks her whether she would be willing, on her husband’s behalf, to donate his liver, kidneys and heart. She signs up the form. Then, Christina asks her if Kevin’s eyes can be donated. She is stunned and then, somehow pulls through and signs the form for corneal transplant. Then, Christina cussedly goes further and asks whether she authorizes to donate Kevin’s skin. Kevin’s wife is appalled and in a subtly stern tone, she quizzes Christina about what to take of her husband to his funeral. The Korean intern walks out of the room and her immediate surgeon-in-chief asks her a startling question: what is the patient’s name? Christina replies: “Kevin Robertson”. The charming chief counsels her that Kevin has a name and is an organic whole not a collection of body-parts ready to be donated. And perhaps the chief should also have said that “doctors are life’s gatekeepers.” (The English novelist Martin Amis in Time’s Arrow)