I am a prospective medical doctor, this post is not meant to vindicate doctors of their wrongdoings, (NO SIREE i'll save that for my kid) but to rather make us appreciate them and to sensitize us to little things we overlook.
The first core principle of medical profession is to harm no one ,also THE PRINCIPLE OF INTERNAL MEDICINE BY HARRISON said and i quote "no greater responsibilities,no greater obligations can befall on lot of human than to be a physician"
sometimes i am pained when people accuse nigerian doctors of professional malpractise, when our counterparts abroad have a more convenient and conducive workplace. i read it somewhere ,when a lad said the chances of a dog surviving cancer in the U.S is greater than the chances of human being surviving cancer in Nigeria .I bet what has been running through your mind is how manage,truth be told the numbers of LINACS(linear accelerator is a radiotherapeutic machine for treatment of malignant cells) for dogs in U.S is about 25 folds the number of linacs in nigeria for treating human.
I came across a post and i am going to share it here.The post is centered around some u.s residents doctors whose dire hard work has landed them on the spotlight of depression,medical negligence,inability to carry out responsibilities properly,broken relationships with families and friends

“I did my internship in internal medicine and residency in neurology before laws existed to regulate resident hours. My first two years were extremely brutal, working 110 to 120 hours/week, and up to 40 hours straight. I got to witness colleagues collapse unconscious in the hallway during rounds, and I recall once falling asleep in the bed of an elderly comatose woman while trying to start an IV on her in the wee hours of the morning.”

“I have made numerous medication errors from being over tired. I also more recently misread an EKG because I was so tired I literally couldn’t see straight. She actually had a subarachnoid hemorrhage, and by misreading the EKG, I spent too much time on her heart and didn’t whisk her back to CT when she came in code blue. She died.”

“After a 36-hour shift, I fell asleep and began dreaming while walking home — repeatedly. It was a four-block walk.”
In general surgery residency, I had one week in which I worked 125 hours … I did a weekend of 72 hours in which I only got 4 hours of sleep. I would secretly hope to get in a car accident and maybe break a leg so that I would be forced to take off from work … just so I could get some rest.”


“During intern year at a program with a nominal 80-hour work week, I worked 100 hours per week for most of a month. I was interviewing a patient when I suddenly realized that I could not remember what I had just asked. I excused myself abruptly and rushed down the hall where I collapsed on the bathroom floor. I leaned against the wall and felt relaxed for the first time in weeks. My face was wet, and I realized I was sobbing. I was so unaware of how exhausted and impaired I had become. I cried because I was tired, and also because the patient I was seeing deserved better attention and care than I was capable of providing. I couldn’t remember any details of his chest pain or risk factors for heart attack. I couldn’t even remember his name or his face. Only that he was friendly and he trusted me. I felt intensely guilty for not being able to stay awake, let alone think like a doctor. I nodded off while crying, propped up against the wall. I woke up and forgave myself. I think I was away from him for less than 10 minutes. I walked back into his exam room and said, “Where were we? Let’s start at the beginning to make sure I get this right. Because what you are saying is really important.” That month during my evaluation, my program director told me that my total number of work hours was a sign of inefficiency. I later learned that others were also working 80 to 100 hours per week, but they falsified their hours to avoid criticism.”

“I was so sleep deprived that I’d fall asleep while writing patient notes and write my dreams into the notes. I’ve fallen asleep on a pile of charts only to have the nurses cover me with blankets. I woke panicked because I was hours behind in my work. I’ve fallen asleep standing up in surgery and witnessed my attending doctors fall asleep while doing surgery. I actually passed out at the end of a 36-hour shift and woke up on a stretcher in the recovery room.”

“A dear friend from med school died during her neurosurgery residency. Drove over a median into a tractor-trailer after a 30+ hour shift. She left behind her family, including a twin sister and her fiance. She was 30.”

“I had married the year before residency, and for that first two years, I was either at work or asleep, so didn’t see my wife, and it was the start of the erosion of the relationship that led years later to divorce. I also suffered permanent health problems from extreme sleep deprivation. Prior to residency, I slept fine (8 hours per night) and had regular bowel habits. Since my internship, I developed lifelong severe insomnia, and went for decades on 4 to 5 hours of sleep/night, as well as severe constipation, using the toilet about every five days

“I was struck down with a very severe depression in the context of emotional conflicts and severe sleep deprivation, after doing a surgical rotation with every other night call and lots of degrading comments from the surgeons recommending that I go into nursing or teaching instead since those were “good professions for women.” This was 1983. I was supported in the sense that I missed six weeks of medical school without censure while I was too debilitated to move physically. I spent those weeks mainly sitting in a corner of my apartment, crying, and seeing my psychiatrist once/week for therapy and meds.”


Are these the doctors you want to see in the hospital? Protect yourself and your loved ones. Always ask, “How long have you been on your shift, Doc?”
I will also like to share the story of one particular dr dana corriel who is a victim of malpractise herself
Here's the short of the long
My obstetrician messed up. She took care of my pregnancy during one of the most difficult periods of my life, medical residency. She missed a shot that should have been given. RhoGam, to be exact. (rhogam is an injection given to a pregnant person whose rhesus factor is different from that of the child so that the mother doesn't develop antibodies that kill the fetus.)
“Aren’t you a doctor?”


How did I not know I needed to get the shot? How did being a doctor myself not prevent me from this terribly unnecessary mistake?

I can’t clearly answer this question, because the guilt of it all still weighs heavily on my shoulders. What I can say is that I put 100 percent of my faith into her hands. After all, I had been a completely healthy woman up until then, with no medical issues whatsoever. I never had to double check anything until then because it just wasn’t ever necessary.

I didn’t even know my blood type. Do you?

Plus, I was in residency, back at the time when resident hours were not limited by laws in place today. I easily put in 80 hours — often more — of work in the hospital, with many sleepless nights. I’m not sure how I did it, and pregnant, no less, but I did. The bottom line was that I was doctoring others, and that in itself, was more than enough.

Something else may have contributed to this, and it’s more of a confession: the fact that I wasn’t ready to be a mom. I didn’t keep a week-by-week tracker of my baby’s progress- as other expectant moms-to-be often do- didn’t caress my belly, or even sing the baby lullabies. I was working 36-hour shifts- treating HIV, alleviating sickle crisis pain, even administering CPR.

Finding out

In my third trimester, hospitalized with fever, a resident barged into my room and, no less than three times, asked — or rather accused, in disbelief — if I had been pregnant before, and specifically if I had had an abortion.

“Are you sure?”

“Never?”

“Not even one?”

I get the confusion, in hindsight, of course. Back then, though, it was nothing short a painful interrogation. To not only discover my body had reacted in a rare way and that this could have been prevented, but to also have my honesty questioned.

They were hoping it was a mistake, that I was an anomaly, and scampering to find an alternate cause, other than physician negligence.

In hindsight — which, in medicine, is always 20-20 — and in speaking with many obstetricians since, it turns out RhoGam is considered an automatic knee-jerk injection to those in the field. It rarely gets missed in this day and age.

But it was! I was missed!

Please excuse the exclamation marks, but my urge to scream out these words fails to be subdued by my need to maintain medical professionalism. It’s an adult-style tantrum. We all need these sometimes because they serve as alternatives to lawsuits and therapy.

The after

After it happened, my pregnancies became high risk. The antibodies my body made were stored forever, consequently multiplying with each one. They waited like weapons, ready for attack. For me, high-risk translated into frequent doctor’s appointments at the high-risk clinic, close monitoring and weekly ultrasounds. There were now the risks of fetal hemolytic anemia, jaundice — as the baby’s blood cells popped-fetal heart failure and death.

This was the future I faced..
I know the last story will be shocking that a medical doctor can also be a victim of negligence



lala ,seun mynd 44 pls help move this to the front page

I no envy doctors at all.


Thank God I did not make that mistake in life

Hmm

God help us
Thanks for this piece

Not having enuff time to sleep is sickness oo!

Front page please.... this's what doctor are facing in the sector.

Seen