Choosing an appropriate doctor can be a difficult exercise, particularly if you are new to the place and do not have reliable contacts to help you out. Every nook and corner of our country is lavishly populated with medical practitioners of all conceivable kinds of ‘pathies’ – allopathy, homeopathy, unani, kaviraji, ayurvedic, naturopathy(by the way, it’s different from and lot less exciting than naturalism!), magnetic therapy, spiritual therapy, yoga, reiki, acupuncture, gem therapy, touch therapy, laughter therapy, hydrotherapy, herbal therapy, urine therapy(both own and the holy cow’s), home remedies, aunty’s cures, naadi therapy, magic, mantras, jhaad phook, *Holy Baba’s bhasmas *and geeky remedies of all shades and hues! Each therapist exuberantly claiming to cure anything and everything from cough to ‘Chinese Restaurant Syndrome’(believe me…there is actually a malady by this name!). You literally have an ample choice ranging from consulting the nearest quack to the remotest super-specialist. In such a knotty situation, the following general guidelines may be of help in choosing an appropriate doctor. I have chosen to focus only on the allopathic form of therapy as I consider my knowledge of all other ‘pathies’ to be pathetically minuscule!
A GP or a General Practitioner(can either be an experienced MBBS or MD doctor) is the veritable ‘Jack of all trades’ in the medical profession. He is supposed to possess a very good ‘general’ idea about the signs, symptoms and cures of a fairly large number of common disorders. So if you have any of the common problems like fever, diarrhoea, nausea, aches & pains, cold, cough, allergy, acidity, sore throat and the like, just land on the neighbourhood GP’s clinic(make sure of the above qualifications to ensure that a quack is not masquerading as a GP). If you are visiting a Government hospital, look out for the MD(General Medicine) OPD. Having had you in his grasp, the GP will happily go on with his routine general check up. He will check your BP, determine your heartthrobs…I mean….the rate at which your heart ‘throbs’ in a minute….or in other words, your pulse rate, tickle your guts to see if you have an enlarged spleen, dive into your throat with a torch to tinker with your tonsils, poke your ribcage with his stethoscope to hear the melodies(or maladies!) emanating from your lungs, and so on. He will intersperse his evaluation with a sprinkling of seemingly inane enquiries like when was the last time your left shoulder ached, what was the colour of your sh*t like, does anything else come out with your burp, what happened first – the toothache or the headache etc. etc. Answer all his questions truthfully; he is only trying to sort out the jigsaw puzzle of your troubles. He may either write you a prescription straightaway, or ask you to get some tests done. Suffice it to say that a good GP should be able to take care of all your routine health problems.
Now the question arises – if the GP is good enough, what are the specialists and super-specialists for? Generally speaking, the specialists are the ones who have MD or MS qualifications in addition to MBBS. Most surgical specialities are outside the purview of the GP. Surgical specialists include General Surgeons(who gleefully draw their scalpels at the drop of a hat.just joking!), Gynaecologists(need I add any ornate descriptions in their sublime honour?), Orthopaedicians(specialists of bone disorders and fractures who literally go hammer and tongs at their job!), Otorhinolaryngologists(auto-rhino-larrinjo-logists) – or in other words ENT(Ear Nose Throat) specialists(proficient in the art of refining your senses therapeutically) and Ophthalmologists(of-thal-mo-logists) – or the Eye specialists(those who insist upon revising your knowledge of the alphabet by asking you to peer into oblong boxes with letters all over it!). The medical(MD) specialists include Physicians(typical sombre looking bespectacled whitecoated blackbooted steth-dangling bookwormish gentleman seen roaming the corridors of infirmaries…. I hope the learned Physicians will excuse my gibberish for I am but an inconsequential and powerless reviewer on MS!), Paediatricians(child specialists), Psychiatrists(sigh-kia-trists) or mental docs(the kind you see in movies giving electric shocks to hapless heroines – in actuality, it is a refined science on which psychotherapy and counselling is based), Dermatologists(skin specialists who keep on writing creams, tubes and lotions by the dozens for those silly and obstinate pimples adorning your pretty faces), Pulmonologists(lung disease specialists) Anaesthetists(those who knock the patients out before any surgery and revive them afterwards), and Radiologists(docs who do sonographies and interpret X rays and CT scans etc.). Then there are Pathologists, Microbiologists, Forensic medical docs, Anatomists, Biochemics, Pharmacologists, Physiologists, Community Medicine docs – all are MD specialists but they do not treat patients. Their work is more of teaching and research oriented.
Finally, the superspecialists. They are those doctors who possess another specialised qualification(DM or M.Ch) in a specific subject, apart from MD or MS degrees. They are, from the medical side – Cardiologists(heart specialists who do angiographies), Neurologists(paralysis specialists), Nephrologists(kidney specialists), Endocrinologists(diabetes/thyroid/obesity specialists), Gastroenterologists(liver & abdominal disease specialists), Oncologists(cancer specialists), & Neonatologists(who take care of critically ill newborns) & from the surgical side – Cardiac(heart) surgeons, Urologists(who deal with kidney operations, urinary stone removal etc.), Gastrointestinal surgeons(who carry out complex intestinal and liver related operations), Paediatric surgeons(who operate on newborns), Neurosurgeons(who operate on the brain), Plastic Surgeons(Surgeons dealing with liposuction, cosmetic surgical procedures, breast implants, skin grafting etc.) Onco(cancer) surgeons etc. Then there are other super-specialists who have their expertise narrowed down to specific procedures like joint replacement surgeons, spine surgeons, minimal access surgeons(who do laparoscopic or ‘key-hole’ surgeries, sports medicine specialists, transplant surgeons, critical care specialists and so on & so forth. There may be other specialities which I may have missed.
Now, the general advice regarding consulting a doctor:Trust the GP or the Physician for all your common problems. A surgeon should be consulted for abdominal pain associated with vomiting, for piles, for all problems related to urine and stools and for all small or big swellings anywhere on the body. Women and children have their respective specialists. For persistant back pains, joint pains, neck pains etc., and of course for fractures an orthopaedician may be consulted. ENT and Eye specialists are there for specific problems related to ear, nose, sinuses, eyesight etc. Going straight to the superspecialist for a seemingly trivial problem should be avoided because they are there for the more complicated things.
I hope you found this review useful. Thanks as always for reading my stuff. Comments invited.
© Sudipto Chakravarty 2006