essay on DOCTORS THE VISIBLE GODS ON PLANET EARTH
Answers
Explanation:
In India, there is an old saying that doctors are second to god on this earth. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, however, describes a God complex as a narcissistic personality disorder.
“Those who are occupied in the restoration of health to others, by the joint exertion of skill and humanity, are above all the great of the earth. They even partake of divinity, since to preserve and renew is almost as noble as to create.”—Voltaire.
The 11th century Greek physician Galen had a huge influence on the medical knowledge of his time, and for several hundred years afterwards. He wrote some 500 medical treatises and lectured widely on topics as diverse as anatomy, physiology, pathology, and diagnosis, as well as psychology and ethics. Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius called him the best physician in the world — an accolade that Galen would surely have agreed with, describing his medical colleagues as ignorant and money grubbing.
Hardly any wonder, then, that Galen’s autobiography focused on his brilliant works and opinions, or that in an article in The Spectator titled “The cult of the prima doctor,” Peter Jones wrote, using his subject’s expertise in both analgesia and anatomy: “Galen was a pain in the backside, staggeringly arrogant and high-handed, disdainful of any doctor (let alone patient) who did not believe every word he said. If ever there was a doctor with a ‘God complex,’ it was Galen.”
Literature abounds with godlike doctors: Dr. Victor Frankenstein created human life; Dr. Hannibal Lecter made a meal of it; mild-mannered Dr. Henry Jekyll had to hide his propensities and took a potion to turn himself into a superhuman maniac; and H.G. Wells’ Dr. Moreau developed creatures by fusing humans and animals. But if real-life doctors were to go rogue, it could do serious harm.
In India, there is an old saying that doctors are second to god on this earth. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, however, describes a God complex as a narcissistic personality disorder.
Explanation:
In India, a country with a population as large as 1.3 billion, doctors are often compared to God and an obvious justification of the same shall rest on their endless toil and commitment to save lives and put all their acquired knowledge at work directing every available resource towards patient treatment. With the vast spectrum of diseases at play and unfortunate accidents in place added to the tendency of the human body to weaken in its function with time and age, it is of no surprise that doctors enjoy a respected pedestalled position within our society. To add to their credibility, they go through one of the toughest academic training periods to acquire the place they are at today: with five long years of graduation wherein medical students undergo rigorous pressure for they learn through practical study, interning under senior doctors, working and studying through days and nights without much time to even complain. What better reasoning there is when a human being with medical expertise protects an individual from dying even in the most complicated of cases which appear to ensure barely little hope, in a country with a staunch faith in the existence of divine forces of creation?
As much as the view pleases and calls for agreement, with the establishment of such an identification of medical professionals with the supernatural entity of God, there comes an exaggerated sense of expectation, a belief that a doctor can save a patient no matter how life-threatening an ailment is and if yet a patient dies it shall always be an outcome of medical negligence. Medicine, though is merely a stream of science which, even though, through meticulous research and practice, has been able to find answers to complicated games of the anatomy, still faces a long drawn way to go; no matter how advanced the field is today, there still exists a vast opening for cultivation of further progress and a doctor can only do as much as the present state of medicinal or surgical knowledge permits. The truth sustains that if fate strikes, the medical body would fail: deaths are inevitable. You cannot expect a patient at final stages of cancer to make it through merely because the individual is being treated by one of the greatest oncologists in the country, neither can you hold on to much hope when an unfortunate accident squashes a man who manages to hold on to his final breaths before being declared dead by the medical professional. Doctors cannot control what is unavoidable- they can help to the best of their abilities but that’s how far their standing goes and these “abilities” I talk about aren’t miraculously associated with anything divine, but are a culmination of the knowledge they worked hard to seek and implement accordingly.