Psychiatrist, heal thyself

THE COUNTRY, particularly its poorer citizens, may now look forward to a significant improvement in the delivery of public health care with the recruitment of doctors from Cuba. They have come from a country highly regarded for the standard of its medical service to fill vacancies in our state hospitals and we believe they should be welcomed. That is why we are quite amazed at the attempt by Dr Hari Maharaj, who happens to be chairman of the ethics committee of the TT Medical Association, to undermine public confidence in the level of care these doctors will bring to our public institutions. To put it bluntly, we find the reasons for his criticism of the Cuban doctors out of place, without substance and totally absurd.

Dr Maharaj makes the alarming claim that the introduction of Cuban doctors to TT will result in a deterioration of the level of medical care and lead to increased risk of misdiagnosis and malpractice. Clearly such a frontal and open attack can have only one purpose, and that is to ridicule the government's effort at manning the nation's health care system and inject doubt and fear in the public's mind about the ability and competence of the Cuban professionals to perform in our country. And what is the reason behind Dr Maharaj's frightening expectation? He claims that it is shortsighted "to introduce Cuban doctors to a society that is ideologically, culturally and socially different." It is his contention that doctors must understand "the belief system, social and cultural practices and lifestyles of the people they treat." We find it unbelievable that such poppycock could come from an experienced psychiatrist holding the position of Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry in the Department of Medicine of the University of the West Indies. What do ideology, culture and a difference in societies have to do with the general science and practice of medicine? Absolutely nothing. It may well be that Dr Maharaj's attack on the Cuban doctors is based on his view that the human anatomy takes different forms and changes its nature according to the ideology or culture under which it exists. Most likely he believes that Cubans, having a different culture and ideology to Trinidadians, are also different creatures anatomically and, therefore, their doctors will find themselves at sea treating alien patients in our hospitals. For apparently propounding such a bizarre idea, we can only say to Dr Maharaj, psychiatrist heal thyself. Cancer or Aids have no culture or ideology.

If, for argument's sake, we take Dr Maharaj's contention seriously, then the medical profession as a whole would be in total chaos as doctors migrate from one country to another with entirely different cultures, different ideologies and different social mores and habits. For example, there are doctors from India working in England and the United States. There are Philippino doctors practising their profession in Canada. There are doctors from countries of the European Economic Union working in different parts of the continent where the culture is not the same. As far as Trinidad and Tobago is concerned, we have had doctors from India, Africa, Philippines, Germany and France working in our health institutions, in a culture that is quite different to theirs, but, for reasons best known to himself, it has only now occurred to Dr Maharaj, with the advent of the Cubans, to make such a ridiculous charge. Fortunately for us, the anatomy of the species homo sapiens is the same all over the world, subject to the same diseases, ailments and the ravages of anno domini, thus permitting the kind of progress that medical science has made. The Cubans should experience no problems here, once they have a working knowledge of English. And the public should not be bothered by Dr Maharaj's arrant nonsense.