{"id":1446,"date":"2015-12-06T12:08:15","date_gmt":"2015-12-06T06:38:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/?p=1446"},"modified":"2015-12-05T17:31:40","modified_gmt":"2015-12-05T12:01:40","slug":"to-do-or-not-to-do-doctors-decisions-and-morality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/to-do-or-not-to-do-doctors-decisions-and-morality\/","title":{"rendered":"To do or not to do: Doctors&#8217; decisions and morality"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just finished reading \u2018<a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.co.in\/books?id=DepE_UwgkSQC\" target=\"_blank\">Better<\/a>\u2018 by <a href=\"http:\/\/atulgawande.com\" target=\"_blank\">Atul Gawande<\/a>. A couple of chapters \u2013 \u2018On fighting\u2019 and \u2018<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2004\/12\/06\/the-bell-curve\" target=\"_blank\">The bell curve<\/a>\u2018\u00a0 \u2013\u00a0 made me think of a year old experience with a doctor, a very well known gynecologist to be precise and one who was almost a \u2018celebrity\u2019 himself. He delivers babies of film stars and has had an impeccable record of delivering babies.<\/p>\n<p>In, \u2018On fighting\u2019, Gawande writes, \u201cThe seemingly easiest and most sensible rule for a doctor to follow is: Always Fight. Always look for what more you could do.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In\u00a0 \u2018<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2004\/12\/06\/the-bell-curve\" target=\"_blank\">The bell curve<\/a>\u2018, he writes, \u201cIf the bell curve is a fact, then so is the reality that most doctors are going to be average.\u201d Somewhere in the middle he talks about \u201cpositive deviants\u201d, doctors and hospitals who keep ahead of the average in the bell curve. He hints at a few reasons that can cause erroneous positive deviants, \u201c\u2026death among the elderly or disabled mostly has to do with how old or sick they are to begin with\u201d or \u201csome allege that the differences are explained simply by the differences in the specific gene patients inherit or by the social class of their families.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ll add one from my end to that list, not accepting or allowing cases that are high risk! And, that takes me to this \u2018celebrity\u2019 doctor. he knew about our history of miscarriages (and thereby, how much we were trying for a baby) but states upfront, \u201cwe do not believe in giving medicines\u201d if the pregnancy has to be helped along. That\u2019s morally wrong for a doctor, isn\u2019t it? By adopting such an approach, he\u2019s not even thinking about \u201cwhat more could I do\u201d to help. Worst part still, he\u2019s gaming \u2018the bell curve\u2019! The reason why he\u2019s appears good at his profession is because he doesn\u2019t allow \/ take risky cases.<\/p>\n<p>In our case, we happened to need these medicines and all we needed were dydrogesterone popularly known as duphaston and low dose asprin.<\/p>\n<p>We calmly switched doctors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just finished reading \u2018Better\u2018 by Atul Gawande. A couple of chapters \u2013 \u2018On fighting\u2019 and \u2018The bell curve\u2018\u00a0 \u2013\u00a0 made me think of a year old experience with a doctor, a very well known gynecologist to be precise and one who was almost a \u2018celebrity\u2019 himself. He delivers babies of film stars and has [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3979,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"book_review_cover_url":"","book_review_title":"","book_review_series":"","book_review_author":"","book_review_genre":"","book_review_isbn":"","book_review_publisher":"","book_review_release_date":"","book_review_format":"","book_review_pages":"","book_review_source":"","book_review_rating":"","book_review_summary":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-30-day-challenge","category-rambling"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/photo-1547139559-c89c59d117611.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1446"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1450,"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions\/1450"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ravi.rajiniravi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}