Hospital the Killer

Paracetamol kills more people annually than plane crashes. A medical practitioner as well as academic, Dr C Aravinda, tells us that. The doc has written an article titled, ‘Over the counter, under the radar: can paracetamol be fatal?’ in the very first volume of Surf&Dive, a new publication from The Hindu. The article says that in the USA alone, paracetamol accounts for more than 60,000 emergency hospital visits annually and over 500 deaths. He draws a contrast between those figures and the 229 deaths that happened globally due to aviation accidents in 2023.

The number of people killed by paracetamol globally every year will be many times more than the figure quoted above. There is no sufficient data available from other continents and hence we don’t know how many are killed by paracetamol there, let alone the victims of other medicines. Are our hospitals killers?

I wouldn’t, of course, go to the extent of asserting that much. I have depended on the hospitals many times though more than half of my experiences were extremely frustrating, the latest being last month in my neighbourhood hospital. Let me elaborate on that experience a bit so that you’ll understand not only my frustration but also the terror that our medical system inflicts on us.

Some insect bit/stung me a few weeks back. I live in a village with a lot of trees and plants all around my house, most of which are grown by me, as you can see in the pic below. 

A view from the verandah of my house

Insect bites are quite normal here and I didn’t take this one seriously either. But, in a few minutes, my body started reacting furiously with nettle rashes appearing in areas of the body which had no connection with the place where the insect bit me: the foot. I borrowed an Avil tablet from my sister who lives nearby but the eruptions on the body went on to increase furiously. So I drove myself to the hospital which is not far and asked the nurse to give me an Avil injection. The nurse insisted on my meeting the casualty doctor who was rather busy. Finally when the doctor tended to me, she didn’t bother to listen to me, instead wrote a whole page of prescriptions on my file. I ended up spending more than an hour with a canula pinned to my arm and a bandage tied around my foot. In the end, when I was liberated from the detention, a bill for Rs1049 was slapped on me.

“Are you alone?” The nurse asked waving the bill.

“Yup,” I said.

“This bill has to be paid before I can remove the canula from your arm.”

“Give it to me,” I said. I went to the appropriate counter and thrust the bill along with my credit card. Done.

No, not really. “Collect your medicines from the pharmacy,” the cashier said.

“Medicines?!”

“Yeah, the doctor has prescribed.”

I got a whole fistful of medicines from another counter and every one of those medicines still remains on my shelf untouched. The Avil injection, which costs less than Rs10, did the job and that was enough. The hospital extracted about Rs1000 from me out of sheer greed. And the hospital is run by Catholic nuns who claim to be doing missionary work for God.

When I reached home finally, looking weaker than when I left (because of the sleep I had during the drip injection) with a bandage on my foot, Maggie was worried. I told her what happened and she burst into laughter. “This is the first time I see someone bandaging a human organ for an insect bite,” she mused. I removed that bandage concealing my sulk.

As I was reading Dr Aravind’s article in Surf&Dive, this recent experience of mine rushed to my mind. It’s not only paracetamol that kills us in our hospitals; the very system is a killer. As a character of Bernard Shaw said, “I have seen more people die by the greed and folly of doctors than by the greed and folly of publicans and sinning women" [Doctor’s Dilemma]. Well! I will still need the docs and their systems as I’m growing old, and so I think I have said more than is good enough for me.