Learning Doctery In Bhadoi

Its a viral infection caused by a bacteria, pronounced the medico importantly after examining a patient who was suffering from blood dysentery. The patient, scared by the copious quantities of blood in his stool, looked suitably alarmed. But he knew he was in good hands at least this doctor could tell what was wrong with him. Which was definitely an improvement over lots of other doctors in this area, the best of whom have as a qualification, some years of training as compounders under qualified physicians.

Take Raja Shanker, or Raja docter, as he is locally known. A BA graduate who worked under a Banaras Hindu University doctor for several years, he now has a small shop the size of a scooter garage on the Grand T runk Road. This is his clinic from where he dispenses medicines to 50-odd patients daily. When we went to meet him, it was eight in the evening and the area was shrouded in darkness (power is cut off here very night for a week, and then every day for the next week). Raja docter sat behind a desk cluttered with medicines, facing the worried relatives of a diarrhoea victim. The weak light thrown by a lantern fell on the emaciated patient lying on a wooden bed with no mattress, getting an intravenous drip.

To prevent the patient becoming dehydrated, Ive put her on a saline drip. Im also giving her Norflox its an antibiotic, he informs us. He most definitely sounds professional. Raja Shankar has been practising for some ten years now, and people in the area swear by his remedies.

I went to him when I had malaria and was shivering with cold. He gave me some medicine and the very first dose cured me miraculously, says Ram Kripal, an employee of a carpet company who lives nearby. His supposed success rate definitely counts as a miracle, given the lack of antiseptic conditions in his clinic.

Forty-year-old Mewa Lal is another medic with scanty qualifications (he has studied up to inter-level), but a lot of common sense. He used to help out a doctor friend in his spare time earlier. My only aim was to learn enough doctery to take care of my own family and neighbours, he says. But his practice became so successful that he resigned from his job and took up his more lucrative new occupation full time.

Today, he treats 30-odd patients daily, carrying the proverbial black bag with emergency drugs, disposable syringes and a stethoscope. He operates, as it were, from home, performing simple surgical procedures and prescribing medicines for common ailments.

But I never do any serious operations like tumour removals, appendectomies and deliveries, he claims. Pollution and lack of hygiene are the two major causes of disease here, he points out. Stagnant water leads to too many mosquitoes did you know that it is the Anopheles mosquito that causes malaria, he boasts. For someone who has not been to medical school, he really does seem to know quite a lot about common ailments.

It is not difficult to figure out why patients flock to these docters. While a qualified doctor in Bhadoi would charge between Rs 50 to Rs 500 as consultation fees, untrained medicos never take more than Rs 25. And doctors in the civil hospital in this area here mostly have parallel private practices and little time to spare for patients in hospital.

I have to spend over 14 hours in my clinic. Sometimes if there are critically ill patients, I stay even longer, says Raja docter. Mewa Lal cycles miles to examine babies with colic, starting work at 7 am and finishing after 10 pm. No wonder so many people here believe that these docters are doing a social service.