Reflections

The relationship between doctors and their patients has undergone a sea change in India . Gone are the days of paternalism, when doctors ordered and the patients listened. But in today's consumer driven market place, this no longer holds good. However such concerns are not just Indian. Similar concerns consume American doctors as well. I am reproducing an opinion by an American anesthesiologist  Shirie Leng  , . Originally from the KevinMD, this post examines one reason for the gulf that has appeared in the trust between doctors and patients. " The subject matter has hit a nerve.  The first post was about how we use and misuse numbers in medicine, and the second made the case that patients are not customers in the retail sense. The opinions in both cases were pretty much split between people who agreed with me wholeheartedly and those who thought me the most misguided idiot doctor ever to approach a keyboard. Why these subjects?  Why are issues of buyi...

Flag of the Ghadr Party  I was recently reading a history of the Ghadr party, the US based mainly Sikh group which played an important part in the freedom struggle, particularly during the First World War.Someday I will write of the Komagata Maru incident; the final bloody finale to that chapter took place in Budge Budge where I have lived for some years in the eighties and nineties. Anyway, on reading the book I came across the name of Baba Hari Singh Usman. I am ashamed to say that I had never heard of him earlier. There does not seem to be much scholarly investigation about him , at least nothing that I could access from the internet. However I did come across this very emotional article written by a Mr Prem Singh Bajaj which was originally published in the   Tribune, Chandigarh. I reproduce it here. It is thrilling story that spans the world and reminds us of times when great sacrifices were made for our freedom.   " While the nation was celebrating the I...