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Dangerous doctors
Written by Nosa Osaigbovo Friday, 23 December 2011
THE trial and conviction of Dr Conrad Murray, Michael Jackson’s doctor, on involuntary manslaughter charges, show the unwavering seriousness with which medical malpractice is viewed in well organised societies.
Doctors in the United States live in dread of malpractice suits, as a verdict in favour of a plaintiff may mean a doctor’s ruin. The doctor is ordered to pay crippling damages and may also lose his licence. Doctors are also severely punished for improper relationship with their female patients.
No doctor has been prosecuted for criminal negligence in Nigeria, as far as I know. But medical malpractice happens in Nigeria. There has been a sharp and dangerous decline in standards in the country’s medical schools.
House officers see patients in many teaching hospitals. Registrars are hardly available and consultants, the few that remain in the teaching hospitals, are invisible gods. Indeed, there is a serious shortage of consultants in the country. It may be an exaggeration, but not a huge or ludicrous one, to say that some house officers are unable to properly take a patient’s blood pressure.
Is Oyinkasola Eniola still alive? HIV-contaminated blood was transfused into her at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital in 2005. She was a baby, only a few days old, when she was sentenced to a life that may be short and steeped in suffering. The authorities of the teaching hospital insisted that her parents were HIV-positive, but tests conducted by LUTH itself showed that they could not have infected their daughter.
Two panels established LUTH’s culpability and the then minister of health retired the chief medical director of the hospital. Four senior members of staff were sacked, but nobody was charged with a crime.
Nobody was also punished at the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, for the incompetence that led to the amputation of Baby Kehinde’s arm. The doctors involved apparently continue to practise medicine.
The situation is far worse in many clinics, especially in the clinics where the medical director is also the sole doctor. The medical directors ‘train’ their own nurses. The duration of a standard nursing course is three or four years, but the young ladies taught by the medical directors begin to wear a real nurse’s uniform after only a few weeks of ‘lectures’. These are young ladies with very basic education to begin with and a hypodermic needle has the lethal menace of a harpoon in their hands.
Some of the doctors do not refer critically ill patients to better equipped hospitals. They also handle medical emergencies that are beyond their competence and the patient dies. Many Nigerians are too ignorant to ask questions or too poor to bother when their relations die due to a doctor’s incompetence or negligence.
One man took an upmarket hospital in Lagos to court after his wife died in labour. He accused the hospital of gross negligence, but the suit dragged on for years and he got no satisfaction in court.
The Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN) tries doctors accused of unethical practice. About seven years ago, a doctor was struck off after the MDCN found him guilty of sexually harassing a female patient. But the MDCN did not investigate a newspaper report that claimed that a doctor in Benue State frightened a teenager, the daughter of a university lecturer, into surrendering her body to him. The doctor was said to have told the teenager that she was suffering from a life-threatening disease and that drugs could only be administered to her through copulation.
Medical practice has come a long way since the days of Thessalus of Tralles who lived in the first century after Christ. Franz G. Alexander and Sheldon T. Selesnick write about him in The History of Psychiatry: ‘A weaver by trade, he became a medical teacher. He promised a doctor’s degree within a few months to anyone who came to him and paid the fee.’
Many Nigerians go abroad, especially to India and South Africa, to seek medical relief and this gives the impression that medical practice in Nigeria is only a little more advanced than what was available in the days of Thessalus. Medical practice in Nigeria has certainly not sunk to such a level of atavistic degeneration. Most students applying to study medicine are brilliant young men and women and those accepted should be given the necessary training and tools to work with.
Nigeria needs competent doctors and not practitioners like Archagathus, the Greek doctor who was called ‘the butcher’. His surgical ineptitude led to the expulsion of all foreign doctors from ancient Rome.
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Your view
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I read your article published in the Nigerian Tribune. I’d like to shift focus away from the moral, cultural or religious reaction to homosexuality—an act which I neither endorse nor condone—and, rather, focus on the issues of civil liberties which guide all civilised societies.
Civilised societies are based on two fundamental principles from which all laws spring. These principles are: 1. Protection of individual liberty
2. Protection of property rights.
Within our imperfect and diverse (cultural, religious, ethnic) world, it is very important to understand the significance of these two principles in order to ensure that human rights (yours and mine) are protected. It is adherence to these principles that would ensure the protection of a Christian in a majority Islamic society, and vice versa, ensure the protection of the practices of a Kanuri man in Abeokuta, and vice versa, and ensure that blacks and Africans can live peaceful in Caucasian societies, and vice versa.
There appear to be two infractions combined in the Nigerian bill banning or criminalising homosexuality; one prevents two homosexuals from legally marrying while the other criminalises (with jail term) homosexual behaviour. I’d like to comment on the latter infraction.
Criminalising, with a jail term, homosexual behaviour violates the basic principles on which civilised societies are founded. This is primarily because homosexual behaviour between consenting adults is an issue of individual liberty which does not violate or infringe upon the property or rights of any other person. Therefore, criminalising homosexual behavior is primitive, barbaric and uncivilised.
More importantly, the formation of legislation should be governed by sound principles otherwise our society would be governed by incoherent and inconsistent laws. By prevailing moral standards and known natural laws homosexuality is abhorrent. We can legislate that homosexual acts offend civic morality and, therefore, should not be practised in public, similar to “Indecent Exposure” laws. However, we should not let our visceral reaction to this objectionable practice undermine the foundation of our unfolding civilisation in Nigeria as there would be a heavy price to pay.
Other immoralities, like lying and cheating, although not all comparable as to level of aversion, offend our moral sensibilities. We do not criminalise all immoral behaviours because there is no easy yardstick to measure on what scale of immorality an act should be criminalised. That an increasing majority of the people practise or condone certain immoralities neither make the immoralities more acceptable nor less criminal. Our basis for criminalising human action should be sound and consistent on the principles or protection of individual liberties and property rights.
We should treat homosexual acts in a similar fashion, lest we undermine our civilisation and give our rights up to the whims of the majority and the legislators. For those that are religious let us leave the final judgment and punishment for homosexual behaviour, as we do other non-criminal immoralities, to our creator.
Temi Alade, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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