Prudence and Madness

As of habit, my family and I have dinner while watching the evening news and discussing the day’s events. Few nights ago, as I sat down for dinner, I heard my parents talk about how our little water station business is not doing well. Same old story: prices of goods going too high but prices of our products we can’t increase for fear of losing customers to the competitors. We’ve been continually tightening our belts, hoping time soon will come when business will be okay again.

Then we heard on TV that the president was discouraging medical practitioners from shifting to nursing. But rather, doctors should not worry about their low income because there is still the medical transcription profession to turn to for better salaries.

I swear my dad could have hurled the fork he was holding at the TV and at the demon speaking in it, if only he hadn’t thought of not having enough money to replace or repair the TV if it gets damaged. Having spent all his money just to send his only daughter to medical school and being told that her doctor daughter could just go being a medical transcriptionist instead of practicing medicine, if the going gets tough, is just too much. All our hardships just thrown aside as if nothing. Reluctantly, he just turned back to eating, mumbling how insensitive and ignorant the president has been, making those remarks, and how the country’s situation is getting worse. I couldn’t really blame him for saying that or for even having the urge to throw the fork at the TV. I would have hurled a knife.

What evil days are we coming to?

The President doesn’t understand how much it takes to produce a doctor. To be qualified to enter medical school, a person must have a bachelor’s degree already with the required number of units in life sciences and pass the National Medical Assessment Test (NMAT). Getting into the top medical schools would be harder because each would prefer candidates with high NMAT scores and a good college record. Each medical school may administer additional exams and/or interviews to further screen the applicants. Then, there’s the ever increasing tuition fees and the expensive books and expenses for procuring the tools of the trade (e.g. stethoscope, diagnostic kit, etcetera). And on the last year of school, medical students (called medical clerks) pay P140,000/year to undergo clerkship, a.k.a. “slaves”, in training hospitals: going on 24-hour duties every 3 days, spending most of their from-duty and pre-duty days being humiliated at case presentations/conferences and then going back to pushing patients’ stretchers, doing bedside monitorings and being scolded at by a handful of powertripping nurses, not to mention spending some ill-fated days being human ventilators to ICU patients. Add to these the ever-present pressures of studying for exams and recitations. Being tired or “toxic” from a 24-hour duty will never be a valid excuse for a lousy case presentation or a failing grade in an exam. That is the medical clerkship that each doctor wannabe undergoes. It is the equivalent of an OJT (on the job training) that is required in other college courses prior to graduation. But, just imagine, a student going on OJT pays, perhaps, only a tenth of the tuition paid by a medical clerk for clerkship. But the former gets allowance for doing office work while the latter pays ten times more than the former just to be a slave in a hospital.

And the toxicities of clerkship goes on and on until the day/ night (depends on what post) before graduation day, when some students march down the aisle at PICC with raccoon eyes despite the makeup because they have come dead tired from duty. Good thing nobody fell off while going up the stage to claim his rolled piece of white paper telling him that, finally, his hardship from pushing stretchers in the hospital, from toxic consultant and residents, and from powertripping nurses, have borne fruit, may it be sweet tasting but bitterly bought.

And the President wants us, doctors, to cast all of those aside to work as medical transcriptionists? Did she think the whole exodus was just due to “low salaries”? If she did, then she has a shallow understanding of the nobility of the medical profession.

At least, my parents understands how much it took me to be what I am now. They would have asked me to drop my quest for that elusive chance to do residency training abroad, in favor of working as MT and earning to help the family during these hard times. If I trained and worked as MT, it could have meant more food in the dining table, more capital for our business and more money to pay-off piling debts. It could have meant an easier life at the soonest possible time. But my parents never did ask me to forsake my chosen career.

However, the President, in her seeming apathy and ignorance, has done otherwise. She seems to be belittling the country’s health professionals. Maybe she thinks the P434 increase in salaries of government hired health care professionals would be enough to stem the medical crisis we are having today. Why couldn’t she just think of a way to improve the health care services, so as to benefit the poor patients and the medical practitioners at the same time?

Maybe she is aware of the gravity of the medical hemorrhage today. But, I fear, she’d rather set a temporary solution for it so she could go back again to her busy work of turning Philippines into a nation of human answering machines and data recorders. After all, these are the two professions that has been raking in the money, and not the medical profession.

It’s just so sad that in a crisis, such as we have, the leader of the nation thinks it all boils down to money, money, and more money.