A Doctor's Crime

Dr Binayak Sen’s tryst with this country’s government and its laws has dropped the hot question on our plate, “How far should doctors go to help their patients?”

For those of you who may not be aware, Dr Binayak Sen is no ordinary rabble-rowsing doctor. He is a specialist in Pediatrics and Public Health and has taught at the Jawahrlal Nehru University in Delhi. His indoctrination probably started with his joining the famous Christian Medical College, Vellore, one of the few institutions that still inculcate human values and spirit of social service in its students.  His research on “Marasmus and Malnutrition in children” further initiated in him a deep involvement in inter-related issues of hunger, poverty, malnutrition and the wasted lives of poor childen.

 Dr Sen, who has dedicated his life serving the poor and marginalized tribals of Chhatisgarh, soon realized that poverty and starvation were the root causes of malnutrition in rural Indian children and that expensive protein and vitamin supplements could not be the prescription for our impoverished ‘Bharat’, a place quite remote from the glitzy, Forbes-featured, IPL-playing shining “India”, that we are more familiar with.  The Christian training must have infused a dose of altruism in this dedicated young doctor, urging his conscience to prick him all night as he lay in bed while children starved, moaned and cried for food in nearby slums.

What would have been the right path for him? Look away from the misery, sit in a swanky clinic, write prescriptions of vitamins for well-fed kids from affluent urban homes, play snooker and gossip over Scotch in the evenings, as many of us do?

Doctors have their peculiar joys, challenges and frustrations. It is difficult to describe the delight we feel when a critically ill child wins his fight and gives that priceless hug to his doctor before heading home. What is frustrating however is to lose a battle and a life when medical cure was just a notch away but eluded us due to shortage of resources, food, medicines or a little care.

How does one meet the imploring eyes of a child suffering from tuberculosis, rendered feeble and bedridden by the additional scourges of malnutrition and poverty?  Does one tell the tribal labourer parents, who cannot afford his treatment that allowing their son to die might be a salvation for them and their remaining children? And what if the money required for saving his son was a small fraction of what his master spent on parties each evening? Would breaking a rule in his desperation to save his child then amount to a hideous crime?

In 2004 Binayak Sen was awarded the Paul Harrison Award from the Christian Medical College, Vellore in recognition of his outstanding contribution to society, ‘for carrying his dedication to service to the very frontline of battle and for redefining the possible role of the doctor in a broken and unjust society”.

And if this indeed was his crime, should doctors not feel proud to commit it many times! 

As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) dated 24 April, 2011.