Surgeon, where art thou!

I came across this very sensitive posting entitled "Advocating for better healthcare in Cameroon" at the following web address:
http://olivemedicalfoundation.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/advocating-for-better-healthcare-in-cameroon/#comment-2

"Dear friends, how many of you have been victim of medical malpractice? Had a complication because of negligence or an unqualified “docta” tried to do surgery on you? Yesterday, I met a patient who had surgery for appendicities from one of our district hospitals. Unfortunately for him, his bowel was injured and he began leaking stool. He was refered to another hospital in shock and died two days after. This is not the first lethal complication caused by this Doctor. The authority pretends to be ignorant. Many people are victim of such malpractice in Cameroon. No body mentions them and no measures are taken by the government to stop such practices. This could happen to anyone. Everybody is a Doctor in Cameroon. Have you been a victim or know someone who has been, its time to speak out. It is time we become responsible for our health and Healthcare sysyem ..."



Dear friends, sympathizers, readers,
This is unacceptable. The American healthcare system has it's faults, flaws and humps but this is exactly what I appreciate about the American healthcare system: The doctor is totally accountable and responsible for every act that he/she does and as such most doctors are quite diligent with their patients and what they do.

Unfortunately scenarios like the one reported above has become very rampant in the Cameroon society. Just a couple of yrs ago, my cousin was "killed" by a doctor. He went in for an ELECTIVE chest wall cyst excision never to walk out of the hospital. He died during surgery. NO ONE till today including the so called doctor ever gave any reasonable explanation as to what happened during surgery that killed this teenage boy. It is ridiculous! Again, this begs for the need of more surgeons in Cameroon since now, any doctor basically gets up one morning and wears a surgeon's hat then go on butchering people. If you're to operate, be ready to deal with the complications, and that's what the rigorous training of a surgeon prepares one for. If you operate enough, you'll come to have a complication but face it head on! don't try to push it by the side and pray that it goes away because guess what? It'll go away alright but this, at the cost of the patient's life hence, in my book, equivalent to murdering a patient. If you took the hippocratic oath and swore to "do no harm" then leave the scalpels to those who would use it for saving patients lives, don't turn it into a killing weapon please.
Do not get me wrong; there're situations where the doctor or surgeon does everything possible to save a patient but all efforts fail and THAT, is understandable. What I cannot stand is a doctor acting irresponsible or not shouldering their responsibility as the one who operated on my cousin or the victim in the above scenario. Also, having thesame complication from a procedure over and over should RING A BELL that you better quit doing that procedure all together till you get more training, find our why you keep having same complication. What you CANNOT DO is maintain the status quo and keep on doing thesame thing, NO way!

Thanks for reading and your thoughts are welcomed.

...a Case FOR SURGERY

It is nice to know that God continues to give his people strenght, the will, courage and capability to help others. Each and everyone of us has a passion. In that passion, lies your purpose in life. Yes, it is also my believe that each and everyone of us has a purpose in life which we execute in various ways and forms. For some, their purpose in life will be executed within a matter of seconds, sometimes unbenknownst to them. Some people dig deeper, seek more and expand their purpose in life, however still within thesame context for which they were meant for.

This brings me to this article (please copy and pase in your browser and read).
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/april/toughcalling.html

It is role models like these that continue to stir up the zest in me, of becoming a surgeon, then going to "ground zero" and carrying out, what I believe is, my purpose in life. Yes, it might be over ambitious to think that all of a sudden, I will eliminate the long lines of patients waiting for a doctor to attend to their surgical needs. Many a time, these patients are just waiting hoping that someone will get to them, and that when they do, there will be something that they can do to cure their illness/surgical issue. The fact is that most doctors in Cameroon and other developing nations that do take care of the surgical burden of patients are not trained as surgeons, they just learn by observing cases during medical school and maybe doing a couple. What that means is that their scope of surgical practice is quite limited and they can only effectively handle a limited amount of surgical disease burden. So you have very few doctors to begin with for an extraordinarily large population with no dedicated surgeon amongst them. Besides the fact that surgery gets my adrenaline pumping, that I like working with my hands, and I know surgery is my calling despite adversaries, it also happens to be the one specialty training that is in limited supply in the developing world and would benefit and save countless number of patients.
When done with training, I want to serve surgical patients and I want them to know that while they're waiting in line, there is someone who really does care about them, who is adequately trained and will do all within reason, within my capacity to help them. I say this because I was once in that position, and I know how it feels to be a child, in severe agony and pain, sitting outside a doctor's office with my parents, and thinking that no one cares about me, and that why is no one coming out here to help me. I will make sure that medical students or other doctors work along side with me, and in that way I'm training them too so that they can inturn use those skills to help patients.

This writing is ofcourse dedicated to Dr Mwenyemali and Dr. Sanoussi and the Pan African Academy of Christian Surgeons who are leading the way to train surgeons in Cameroon. This is a great implementation of the popular adage: it is better to teach a hungry man to fish than to give him a fish.

Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts.