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 ...
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.
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