Alina Sarag died of tuberculosis after her GP claimed she was 'lovesick' Photo: Newsteam
Isn't Socialized Medicine, AKA OBAMACARE, wonderful?......
Posted on 05/15/2012 2:22:23 PM PDT by Red Badger
A 15-year-old schoolgirl died of tuberculosis after her bungling GP claimed she was 'lovesick', an inquest heard.
Alina Sarag was seen by more than five doctors at four different hospitals but medics failed to detect the curable disease.
Her distraught parents even called her GP more than 50 times about their daughter's ailing condition over a four-and-a-half month period before her death on January 6 last year.
An inquest heard that her GP, Dr Sharad Shripadrao Pandit, accused her parents of "mollycoddling" her.
Shockingly, he even claimed her symptoms were brought on because she was 'lovesick'.
Her distraught father, Sultan Sarag, 43, broke down as he told Birmingham Coroner's Court: "The doctor said to her 'Did you meet someone on holiday? Are you missing him?'
"She found it very distressing he was suggesting she was lovesick for a boy.
"He said all the problems were in her head and she should see a psychiatrist or spiritual healer.
"When he said that in front of her it totally broke her heart.
"He said she was only doing it to keep me at the house nursing her.
"He [Dr Pandit] said 'It is because of you that she is making it up'.
"He said when she was younger my attitude had a detrimental effect on her.
"I was running around looking after her, nursing her.
"He said 'She's only doing that to keep you in the house so you don't go from there'.
"That's what his explanation was."
Mr Sarag also claimed Dr Pandit refused to test his daughter for TB.
He told the inquest: "He said, 'We don't need these tests, we are not going to get them done either.'
"As you tried to progress he just totally changed the subject."
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Alina Sarag died of tuberculosis after her GP claimed she was 'lovesick' Photo: Newsteam
Isn't Socialized Medicine, AKA OBAMACARE, wonderful?......
Wouldn’t a simply x-ray have cleared this up??
X-rays cost money, you know!
Or even cheaper, a TB skin test
Repeat after me....progressives know more than you do.
They finally did an x-ray, but said it was a ‘chest infection’.........
I just read the article - he refused to test her.
According to the article, the doctor refused to test her.
Heartbreaking. TB is NOT an easy way to die—
Coming to the USA if Omarxist has his way and the SCOTUS caves to his threats.
It does seem, however, based upon a very superficial reading of this report that the family physician screwed the pooch and the child paid the price.
Coming soon to America if Obama is re-elected.
Im pretty sure I would have gone postal on said “doctor”.
Did you see the part where her father is being treated for TB, a former classmate had TB, and the went to Pakistan recently on a trip? Add all that with her symptoms and it should have been a no brainer. A simple sputum test would have shown it immediately..........
Must be from Lancashire.............
Maybe and there’s a routine and cheap pin prick to test for it. All teachers used to have to get tested. My son had to get tested before going on some of his meds. Good grief.
Yes. Anyone living in close contact with a known TB patient needs to be treated with Rifampin prophylactically. This case is a crying shame and a tragedy.
There is no way this is a real MD...if it is, he should be jailed. No one could be that stupid..he did it purposely. I would look at murder charges.
I’m gonna get my head handed to me but Indian (or Pakistani) doctors and pharmicists are NOT my favorites. I avoid them at all costs.
That’s what happens when you bend the cost curve down.
The area where I live is noteworthy for the lack of American physicians. The local doctors are all Hindu or Pakistani. Rather than go to the doctor locally I drive 75 miles. The local hospital is a notorious death house.
Dreadful. Poor girl. RIP.
If ObamaCare isn’t overturned, this could happen in the United States.
What citizenship does the doctor hold and where was he educated? Call me racist but the name alone calls up red flags. Also, why did the father make 50 calls to the doctor whom he knew wasn't going to do anything. After the first 3 calls, he should have been signing up a new GP. How the heck could the hospital claim the TB history not been picked up if so many around her had it?
I'm not sure you can do that in the UK.
The answer to this is somewhat long, but if this were classic TB then having a chest x-ray would have helped a lot to make this diagnosis. There are a ton of issues that this case exemplifies, but I would bet that central to the case is the current policy wonk approach to medicine which encourages physicians to practice ‘cost effective’ medicine. Politicians and epidemiologists are clueless to the realities obscured by such an approach.
It used to be taught in medical school that to be a good physician one had to ‘have a high index of clinical suspicion’. In other words, make sure you don't miss things because you haven't thought about them or because you've assumed the easiest and most benign diagnosis.
Now, one is encouraged to consider the statistical likelihood of disease before ordering tests. In this context, the likelihood that any fifteen year-old girl in the UK is going to have an abnormal chest X-ray is very small, and this is especially true if the symptoms she is exhibiting are somewhat non-specific (e.g. fatigue). So these docs probably went with the odds, and consequently made a fatal mistake.
The bottom line is that medicine has to be practiced as though each person is a unique case - because they are. Night sweats in this population (a common symptom in TB) can be caused by anything from too many covers, to TB or a lymphoma. Fatigue can be caused by anything from texting at night after your parents go to sleep, depression, to a life threatening disease such as leukemia or as in this case TB.
You have to not be lazy, and you have to treat each and every person individually - without dismissing possibilities just because they are unlikely. You don't have to go to medical school to follow an algorithm, but you do to become a good physician, because you need to be able to think far above and beyond algorithms (or as they call them now - ‘critical pathways’).
Anyway, this is a tragic case. Based on this girls surname (Sarag) and her appearance she is probably Indian. A good physician would have factored this into their diagnostic approach and considered whether or not she had spent time in India - a country that has the highest current prevalence of TB in the world.
My advice to any patient is not to trust anyone. Hold your docs feet to the fire, ask questions, and don't hesitate to get second opinions when you feel you need to. It seems that the parents did all of that in this case, and it still ended tragically.
Since the 1950’s, Indian and South Asian doctors and nurses have been a huge part of the NHS. And most of them are superb. The bad apples arent any worse than the bad white/black doctors.
Why?.
AS I have pointed out to another poster, Indian doctors and nurses have been part of the British system since the 1950’s. They come here to train (as I assume they do in the US and Canada), and so get training in a first class country.
Those who stay or are native-born British Asians are by and large very good doctors and nurses. Two of my local GP’s are Indian (as opposed to British Asian) and you couldnt get two better and nicer doctors.
I dont get why Americans are reticient of Indian doctors.
Why would you have a problem with a Hindu or Sikh doctor?.
Or a Muslim one, unless you are dumb enough to think he is part of the jihad...
Foreign doctors, I assume, as in the UK, will get trained in the US and therefore get first class training. In the UK, Indian doctors and nurses have been part of the NHS for decades and most are excellent doctors and nurses.
You drive 75 miles because of your ignorance. Wow.
Why would you have a problem with a Hindu or Sikh doctor?.
Or a Muslim one, unless you are dumb enough to think he is part of the jihad...
Foreign doctors, I assume, as in the UK, will get trained in the US and therefore get first class training. In the UK, Indian doctors and nurses have been part of the NHS for decades and most are excellent doctors and nurses.
You drive 75 miles because of your ignorance. Wow.
I don’t know if all Americans dislike Indian doctors & pharmacists - I said that I don’t like them. Not all but a lot. If you like them, that’s fine.
I have an Indian Doctor myself, a woman in fact. I’m a 51 year old man and have never felt more comfortable with any Doctor in my life.
Pandit is a Hindu surname.
Err...you forget or didn’t know that she had had TB once before. That shoulda been a clue to these clueless doctors.
Why?.
Didn’t read through that carefully, but you’re right. If they knew that bit of history and ignored it they deserve to be sued, although I’m not sure that happens in the UK.
Thank you.
A bad doctor is a bad doctor.
And frankly the ignorance on this thread about India is depressing. I am convinced some here think Hindu, Sikh and Muslim are all the same thing.
Thank god for intelligent folk like you.
I know competence when I see it. I have trusted this woman with my life and will continue to do so.
No, but it could have led to a correct diagnosis. Antibiotics will clear it up.
"He said all the problems were in her head and she should see a psychiatrist or spiritual healer.
That is a universal medical punt. When they don't know, doctors seem to either blame the patient ("your imagination", "psychosomatic", 'Delusional Parasitosis", Etc.
A good doctor will admit they don't know and refer the person to a specialist or another doctor.
One you should part ways with will blame you.
I have one of the best oncologists in the country and he is Indian. I
love him to death because he saved my life! He is the nicet and most caring doctor I have ever known and I know A LOT of them.
Where I live, there was a huge influx of Indians in the mid 70s. They did not adopt easily to American customs - like the customer always being right, etc. or not pushing on trains going into Manhattan, lol. Many of the pharmacists are downright reluctant to hand over drugs purchased through doctor’s prescriptions. Weirdly suspicious! And God forbid you are ONE penny short of paying for something. And I don’t think Indian doctors are very good with women patients.
That is simply my un-pc opinion. But as you can see, there is already one American here who is sticking up for Indian doctors. We don’t all think the same way on this subject.
I’ve never met a doctor in America who blamed the patient. That’s generally because if they sluff off the patient, they may end up in court.
I have a relative who I believe has Munchhausen Syndrome. If one doctor over 30-40 years had told her “it was all in her head,” my family would have been relieved of a lot of stress. But our doctors are afraid of confronting neurotic people.
actually, it is quite easy to miss TB, especially if it is a “primary” infection, which develops before the Body’s immune system kicks in (for TB this takes a few weeks)...
In primary TB, you develop a fuzzy pneumonia and a pleural effusion and then the TB can spread all over the body. I’ve seen (and missed) one case (who eventually got diagnosed by someone else when the “pneumonia” didn’t go away and she was referred to a specialist).
The problem is that the skin test for TB is negative in these primary cases, and since we rarely see TB in the US, you just don’t think of it.
What is typically seen in TB cases occurs after the body’s immune system gets going and “walls off” the TB infection, to stop the germ from spreading. Then you see thick walled abcesses in the upper lungs on x rays. Again, it’s a hard area to see on routine x rays but can be seen easily with a more expensive CT scan.
This can be missed, usually in someone who has TB scars from the past, but it is a “slow” disease. Often if we see pneumonia or old tB on X ray, and the person is coughing but not too sick, we usually just order sputums “just in case” and boy, do the nurses and family get upset when the sputums come back positive in six weeks, and they all need to be checked that they didn’t catch TB....
The only reason I am surprised the Tb was missed is that she is Asian, a high risk group, and her doc has a foreign name, probably from India, so he too should have seen cases and recognized. it.
But if it was a case of “primary” TB, he might have thought it was something else.
A doc trained in the US would probably miss it....
see my note...if it was primary TB, which spreads through the body quickly because you don’t have a good immune system to wall off the infection, the skin test is negative and the X ray is not typical for Tb.
Repeat after me: Diversity is our strength.
I want an Anglo doctor the same way a Muzzie wants Omar to handle his junk, not Steve.
I also want an Asian masseuse, an Irish bartender and a black jazz musician.
Anergy is like that...
But not doing it, in this situation, is negligent
TB can still be present, with a (-) TB skin test,
in immunocompromised patients
This highlights many things.
First, of course, the socialist system in UK sucks.
Second, when you drive your country’s doctors out of business, guess who migrates to your country to fill the void?
Third, the migrant-doctors don’t give a crap about women.
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