Arrogant Ignorance

ignorance, many a time, makes the peson arrogant. i have seen this happening in my practice day in and day out.

i regularly get patients with corneal ulcers. a devastating infection of the clear part in front of the eye. if not treated in time the patient loses the eye. ( sometimes it has to be removed completely).

aggressive medication is the answer. with the advent of newer generation eye medicines, these conditions can be handled in a far better way than yester years.

i had one such patient. a village head man. uneducated. but the headmanship had gotten to his head.

" hey kid, ( i am 34 yrs old), can u treat this?"

"i dont want trial and errors ", he said, "can you or can you not?"

this old man had had this infection for the last 8 days. he had not seen even the village doctor, forget an eye doctor.
he had tried local remedies which included rose water, alum water, cows milk, cows urine, some herbs and shrubs. he had even gone ahead and put lime in the eye to 'kill' the germs. ask any eye doctor, what devastating effect lime has on an eye!

i told him that the only answer was complete removal ( evisceration ) of the eye as the condition was beyond repair.

"hows that possible, you fool. you dont know anything!"

"all the shrubs, cows urine etc. has damaged your eye sir." i told him.

"impossible", he retorted. " how dare you blame the age old remedies ? you cant treat with your chemical poisons. tell me that. you incompetent fellow. I will see how your practice thrives in this area. i am going."

some days later i came to know that he went ahead to mumbai. spent 10 thousand rupees and finally underwent an evisceration.

so why didn't he listen to me?

The answer is quite simple.

the fact that i came to practice in a rural area all the way from a mega city like mumbai, made him think that i dont know anything in my field, and thats why i was incompetent and have run away to a remote location.

this just shows an inferiority complex these village people have about themselves. they just cant believe that some body can come from a city and live them. how can somebody offer good service to them. they are villagers and not city dwellers.
they really have some funny kind of complex.

add to it the illeteracy and the innate arrogance, we have a nice cocktail here.

albeit, such intances have been rare, but they have occured.

C U soon !!