The becoming of half a doctor
Iwas introduced to the term ‘half doctor’ in the mid-1990s when I was doing my internship. It was a hot summer noon, and I was about to leave after morning duty. I looked at the vital parameters of all patients in the ward. An elderly female, with as many wrinkles on her face as grey hair on her scalp, caught my attention. Scanning her records, I found out that I needed to taper her medicines. As I started explaining it to her, her son approached me and said, ‘I have already reduced her medications by seeing her treatment chart.’
‘But how would you know that?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Well, managing her for the past 10 years has made me a ‘half doctor’,’ he replied. He was flattered when I appreciated his skills.
At that time, little did I know, I would struggle with ‘half doctors’ throughout my practice. And like all other doctors, I have repeatedly dealt with the complications arising out of alterations in the treatment done by them. More often than not, successfully. Patiently.
There are two other kinds of people who are ‘half doctors’ — the long-serving assistants of doctors are famous as ‘half doctors’ in their villages; and some label the spouses of the doctors as ‘half doctors’. Often, it has led to amusing situations.
In one such instance, my doctor friend was threatened with divorce. It happened because of a situation arising out of ignorance of the medical knowledge of his ‘half doctor’ spouse. He had gone home to visit her on the weekend. I was his room partner in the hostel and, in his absence, partied with a coterie of friends. After the hullabaloo was over and everybody had left, I felt a sharp, searing pain of acidity late at night. I needed some medicine urgently but could not locate it in the room. A mobile call was expensive those days, so I messaged my room partner, desperate to get some relief. The beep of his mobile interrupted them in the middle of the night. It was his wife who saw the message at an odd hour. It read, ‘I need ppi. I’m dying.’ PPI stands for proton pump inhibitors — drugs used for relieving gastritis. The wife mistook it for a short form of ‘pappi’ (kiss).
The poor friend was at a loss to explain the situation to her. Any chemistry happening between them a few minutes before stood threatened as she vowed to turn it into history. Google had not penetrated the phones back then. He had to pull out his medical textbooks to prove his righteousness. The matter only rested when he promised to get rid of me the very next day.
Over the years, ‘Google baba’ has made our lives challenging by converting a whole techie generation into half doctors. Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, I wonder, on which side of the table will a person be labelled as half doctor!
