27.08.2006
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Memoirs of a Cynical Medic (1)
_ by Tayza Thuria
As soon as we first arrived in medical school as pre-medical or first year students, we were told that there’s not enough laboratory equipment and chemicals etc for practical learning of basic sciences. What happened, we asked, and they explained that rioters during 1988 people’s uprisings had destroyed the warehouses where those equipments were stored.
But everybody knew that 1988 pro-democracy demonstrations were totally peaceful and non-violent. To get an excuse for their impending coup, the military opened up all jails in Burma and let all criminals go free. They had two aims in doing that; to cause instability and lawlessness, and to keep jails empty and ready for detaining political dissidents after the coup.
Even the teachers in medical school were critical on authorities’ claim that rioters of 1988 uprisings had destroyed everything. The truth was that our medical school was situated just in front, on the other side of the road, of government’s main radio and television broadcasting station where a very huge number of troops were guarding the broadcasting station. When the criminals, newly released from jails by the military, came to loot the medical school’s laboratories, why the soldiers guarding broadcasting station on the other side of the road just stood by and looked on and did nothing to stop the looting? A few gun-shots into the air could have easily frightened the looters away. But they deliberately allowed the lootings to go on so that they could make claims that the country was in chaos and military had to take over power to stabilize the country. One couldn’t help feeling cynical about the situations.
After passing through the pre-med year with inadequate laboratories, we encounter another serious shortage in the second year. This time it’s the shortage in dead-bodies for practical Anatomy classes. Medical schools got dead-bodies whenever authorities found bodies of homeless dead people on the streets. Supply of such dead bodies was not scarce but there was just not enough formalin to prepare them for dissection and study by students in Anatomy classes. So each formalinized dead-body was shared between two groups of students, one group dissecting and studying on the left side and the other on the right. The arrangement was OK for studying paired organs like legs and arms, but when the time came for studying the organs like brain and heart the large number of students crowding over a small organ was absurdly like a swarm of flies teeming over a rotten carcass. Two groups of students, each group with at least fifteen students, getting just one organ for their very essential studies in their medical education, just because the authorities could not, or would not bother to, supply enough formalin to medical schools! One couldn’t help feeling cynical in these circumstances.
As if shortages of equipments and teaching aids were not enough for our sufferings, authorities in Burma closed down Universities and Colleges quite frequently. Whenever a small group of students made a demonstration to protest about their grievances, all the students in all Universities got their education disrupted as a collective punishment, as authorities closed down all Universities immediately. Because of such frequent closings-down, medical students of our generation had to take ten to twelve years to finish medical education and to become doctors.
And, if medical students had hoped that becoming a doctor would end their woes of student-life, they later found out that more disappointments were waiting to ambush them all along their medical professional life.
On my first posting as a house-officer (or house-surgeon, as they are called in Burma), I was posted in an Obstetrics and Gynaecology ward, to look after women and their women’s problems. What stunned me was the number of cases of septic abortion I saw in the hospital. All abortions were, and are, strictly illegal in Burma. Doctors, trained to be law abiding, dared not perform any abortion on any pregnant woman for any reason, medical or psychological or social. But illegal abortionists with little or no proper medical training were, and are, rampant. They use unsafe and un-clean methods to induce abortions. They brutally massage on pregnant women’s abdomen, and they insert un-hygienic sharp objects into women’s birth-canals. Even when things go wrong, because of the illegal nature of their business, they are usually reluctant to send over the patients to hospitals. So eventually when women arrive at hospital, they were already moribund with septicaemia. I just couldn’t understand why military government maintained very strict laws against abortions on one hand and turned a blind-eye to illegal abortionists on the other hand. Or, maybe, illegal abortionists gave bribes to policemen, whose basic salaries averaged at about 5 US$ per month, and so police deliberately allowed dangerous, but lucrative, illegal abortion practices to thrive on.
Another significant feature of Maternity hospitals in Burma is their total lack of effort to alleviate of the pain suffered by women in labour and during childbirth. Women just have to suffer because painless procedures such as epidural anaesthesia are not available, except in expensive private hospitals which are affordable only by rich families of military generals and their cronies.
And, another common feature of Burmese Maternity wards is the very high rate of neonatal jaundice in newborn-babies. One reason is the un-hygienic conditions in the wards leading to infections in newborns. Another reason is the exclusive breastfeeding, which means infants are fed only breast-milk and nothing else, not even water. Because of very prevalent diarrhoeal diseases, lack of clean water supply, unsatisfactory food-hygiene and lack of fly proof latrines in rural areas, nursing mothers are forced to do exclusive breastfeeding. Reduced water intake due to exclusive breast-feeding, coupled with some infections, leads to soaring rates of jaundice cases in new-born babies in Burma.
To avoid tiring you down with too much cynicism, we shall rest here for this week, and will continue next week.
Comments
Feraya said _
Thank you very much for telling us about how it was in Burma regarding healthcare at your medical school and hospitals. It must be worse than ever now. Looking forward to more cynicism next week.
D Law said _
"Cynical" is better than the one you proposed in your draft. But I wonder if "Candid" might be a more-inclusive adjective. I hope you will write enough serial articles to make it into a book, and I'm looking forward for your next one.
Your Comments here_
Request: If you can kindly volunteer to translate BURMA DIGEST English articles into Burmese, please let us know burmadigest@tayzathuria.org.uk .
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