Between thoughts and words

"The psychiatrist listens to everything I say patiently. His treatment helps me a lot. I am feeling better now. But still I don't feel like I have poured my heart out till I sit with you and speak to you..." said a 45 year old woman in one of my clinics. She lost her son in a road traffic crash 3 years ago. She is suffering from a severe extended grief and the past 3 years have been very stormy. Recently, a psychiatrist has started visiting our clinic two days a month. This lady consulted him last month and since that visit, she has had a dramatic improvement in her symptoms and her mood. I ascribed her feeling of satisfaction when she had a conversation with me to our long stating clinician-patient relationship and the trust that has built over the years. Yesterday, I realized there could be more to it than that. An elderly man who came to the clinic yesterday for his diabetic foot ulcer dressing, commented to our nurse on his way out of the clinic, "there is someth...

Recently we received a generous philanthropic contribution at our rural clinic and are in the process of setting up a basic laboratory service. One of the greatest challenges has been recruiting a laboratory technician. There are many young boys and girls in the local villages who have completed their diploma in medical laboratory technology, but they are not choosing medical laboratory work. While the market rate of salary for a fresh medical laboratory technology graduate is about 7 to 8 thousand rupees a month, they would get double the salary if they went for job as labourers in local manufacturing and textile export companies.  Among the few applications that we received, many of them had no practical exposure in laboratories, because they had gone away for work in these factories. We decided to take any young enthusiastic person interested in the work, train them for this purpose and gradually create a sustainable model of laboratory services. But we have been having a minor ...

While discussing with an erstwhile student this morning, the discussion rapidly morphed into an argument. The student said, "while I am grateful for the fact that you engaged in this discussion, what you are saying does not make sense to me and does not really matter to me". My initial reaction to it was anger and hurt. But then I slowly realised that there is a 20+ years age gap and a huge generation gap between us, which is the reason for such a predicament. When I brought it up, the young man pointed out to me that I am unnecessarily invoking a generation gap to cover up my inability to convince him. I had to end the conversation there, because things were getting uncomfortable. Here are some of the things which I told him, which did not make sense to him and thus led to the rapid south-bound spiral of the discussion.  1. "Self care is over-emphasised. It comes from an unnecessary heightened sense of importance for the self." Self preservation and caring for the ...