Thursday, May 14, 2009
The most important lesson I learnt..
During one of my the peripheral postings of internship, i had to report to local leprosy control center, which was located in a retired police officer's house. I was dot in time,the office was still closed. The octogenarian police officer welcomed me and offered a seat. His equally old domestic hep was moving around . I noticed he had varicose veins and edematous legs. The officer wanted to know how the varicose veins can be treated.I was fresh with my recently acquired knowledge started blurting out all the surgeries that be done for it.The old officer simply laughed and said "see for him the treatment is to tell him that he has to learn to live with it"..And after so many years i still hold it close to my heart that it was the greatest lesson I learnt in my entire medical career.Many a times that is the only valuable treatment people need, which we ourselves should understand and help them understand that they have to learn to live with whatever ailments they suffer from..
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Thought provoking Seema. Today I saw a patient (middle aged woman)with lot of anxiety related symptoms and multiple medications. When we dwelled further into her problem, we realized that she had a very low self esteem, because of poor teeth color and alignment. She has no dental insurance and unable to fix her teeth. She is ashamed of going around and ashamed of opening her mouth and ashmaed of smile. It's a different world here.
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ReplyDeleteyour postings are simply down to earth and thought provoking. keep it up.Make your contribution to our spot also.
We become horses with blinders because of the so called education and knowledge dumping. It's only when we come across people like your old officer and blog posts like this, we become aware that there's more to things than we actually know and believe. Beautiful piece of work with a great message. :)
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