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09:54 AM
Bikram Vohra
JournalismPakistan.com
Aug 11, 2013
I was just thinking ref a friend who is undergoing surgery that one of the worst aspects of medicine is the massive gap between taking a sample of blood or bone marrow or whatever and giving the result.
It’s a global thing, often later in developed countries that acceptable. Medical forensics have failed to keep pace with treatment and the whole mental comfort zone is jeopardized. How do they expect someone suspected or being examined for some dreaded ailment to hang in there for two weeks while the tests are conducted?
Lab work is either clogged, there is not enough to go around or medicine itself has become so commercial that the patient’s wellbeing is not a major consideration, just bill the blighter and the devil takes the hind leg.
By the time that result comes from some exotic locale to which the sample of body tissue was sent the patient is a wreck. He has had a series of sleeplessness nights, his resistance is ragged, his imagination is running wild and he is almost half as sick again with sheer gnawing anxiety.
You would have thought that by now this part of medical treatment would have been given a boost in psychological terms considering how important it is. What’s the point of giving the patient so much grief? Get more labs, cut down the gap between the tests and the results and make an already uphill situation easier to navigate.
Doctors I have spoken to nod understandingly, then say it is out of their hands. Surgeons shrug and say they only come into the picture after the result arrives. Administrations say the labs have a waiting list. Everyone passes the buck. For what it is worth I say this time should be cut down drastically, it is cruelty to keep someone waiting so long.
(The writer is a Senior Editorial Advisor of Khaleej Times and the paper’s former Editor. He has also been the Editor of Gulf News, Gulf Today, Emirates Today and Bahrain Tribune)
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