Medical education in India and most parts of the world is a long and arduous process. It takes nearly 12-15 years after high school to crea...
Medical education in India and most parts of the world is a long and arduous process. It takes nearly 12-15 years after high school to create a well-rounded super-specialist who can be considered an expert in his field. The super specialist can be a heart surgeon, an intensivist or an anaesthetist. Each specialist is a master of his domain with some working knowledge of other specialities. Then there are other professionals who qualify to use the term “Dr” as a prefix. This would also include the practitioners of ayurveda, homeopathy, siddha and unani, the so-called indigenous medicine systems.
Covid-19 is destroying entire populations in various parts of the world and qualifies to be called as one of the biggest health crises of our lifetimes.. However, among this motley crowd of doctors, there are only a few of us who are actually capable of treating a disease like it. This would include physicians, infectious disease specialists, pulmonologists, critical care doctors and anaesthetists. Public health professionals also play a major role in arresting the spread of the disease.
Heart surgeons, cancer surgeons, laparoscopic surgeons (like me) and brain surgeons surprisingly do not figure in the list. This simple fact somehow eludes the editors of newspapers and...
