Quo Vadis, doc?

‘Don’t live in a town where there are no doctors’ advises an ancient Jewish adage.

Wise words indeed.

When we were part of the process of growing up, family physicians were harbingers of both good and bad news when it came to our collective health.

So, when grandma slipped on the bathroom floor and sprained her ankle, or baby brother was down with a bout of the pox, Doctor Uncle was the person to call. With a morbid doctor’s kit and an evil-looking syringe, this bespectacled gent, with a stethoscope coiled round his neck, was the bugaboo for most kids in the household.

Sidney Sheldon fans would remember Dr John Harley, the kindly physician of the Blackwell family in The Master Of The Game. He was as much part of the central thread of the story as the protagonists of this masterpiece were. But where is this avuncular family doc today?

We have silently transited to the age of specialists and super-specialists. The trusted ageing one-healer-of-all-diseases is almost history now.

Today, a common cold is reason enough for hypochondriacal patients to run to an ENT surgeon to sniff out their worries. Specialised clinics for everything from headaches to bad breath promise to wipe all your worries away.

Dr Sachidananda Kamath, who practises in Kochi, agrees when asked if the obituary of the family physician has been written. “As people became more literate, awareness increased. This, coupled with an improvement in living standards has given them the ability to shell out the exorbitant fees specialists charge. The gradual extinction of the general practitioner has begun,” he says.

Today, discipline-intensive medics have their hands full. They constantly dash from hospital to clinic to home, catering to needy patients. And even while they commute between these places, the diagnoses, advice and prescriptions go on over the mobile phone.

“No specialist is left with any time to make house calls like the good old family doctor once did,” adds Kamath.