Rape and Overcharge With a Smile

Three stories brewing about India's creaky, high-tech and dubiously ethical medical industry
are making me wonder if everything I have ever written that is positive about the medical care should be stricken from the record.

Cancer Patient Raped in Hospital (Tribune) - a sixteen year old cancer patient in a Bombay hospital was raped and impregnated while she was anesthetized and undergoing treatment. She never realized that she had been raped by the doctors or attendants until months later when she missed her period.

Treat Patients With Cheek:MK (Deccan Chronicle) Chief Minister Karunanidhi has come out in favor of better bedside manner in the states over crowded and ill-equipped hospitals. "It is the manner and the humane approach towards patients that bring credibility to the hospitals, not the state of the art equipment," he said. I assume this also means that doctors should, in the future, refrain from raping their patients.

"We Only Try to Provide Quality Care" (Deccan Chronicle, print only) Yesterday Vinodhini, a reporter at the DC, ran a story saying that hospitals in Chennai routinely schedule people for unnecessary tests in order to drive up corporate profits. Doctors are assigned a weekly quota for MRIs and other scans that they must sell to patients or possibly have their pay docked. This, of course, is why when a friend of mine who works at a local NGO had to take her co-worker to the hospital when she was suffering from shock was immediately carted towards the MRI machine and not immediately treated for her obvious--and potentially fatal--ailment.

Over the last year I have run several stories praising the research sector in India. Medical centers here are ahead of the curve on stem cell treatment and generic pharmaceutical manufacture, but from some reason patients are still being killed, raped and generally mishandled at even the best hospitals around the nation.

Somebody please make it stop.

India's Medical Schizophrenia

I still don't understand medicine in India. One day I can be investigating illegal clinical trials that spawn mutant children and the next I will be profiling a top-notch hospital that attracts American patients. A week after that I'm uncovering gangs of kidney thieves that steal thousands of organs from poor people and a little while later I'm discussing revolutionary new stem cell treatments that seem to be years ahead of the United States. Welcome to my life of juxtapositions. Today I'm interviewing a man who was paralyzed from a broken spine and is now able to talk again with a first-of-its-kind stem cell treatment. Real the bodyhack post below.

A paralyzed man with a broken spinal cord can walk again after a revolutionary spinal cord treatment implanted his own stem cells into the injury and sparking a recovery. The patient had broken his spine while working on a construction site in Abu Dhabi and had been paralyzed from the waist down. The treatment was deceptively simple. A joint team with Lifeline and Nichi Center for Reproductive Medicine isolated stem cells from the man's bone marrow with a cooled centrifuge and introduced the fluid into his spinal cord.

It is still too early to know if this treatment is one of a kind or could be transformed into a regular treatment for spinal cord injuries.

Doctors from Lifeline Hospital have had a recent string of success with clinical applications of stem cells, including a major breakthrough I reported for Wired News involving a successful treatment of a diabetic ulcer in November.

I have been in touch with the doctor's at lifeline for more than a week and will have updates on this case soon. For more information check out the story in the Hindu. [link]

As for what I'm up to tomorrow. I shudder to think of what I'm going to find behind the city's morgue . . .