Dear Editor,
MY hope is that this letter will help to sensitise people to the deplorable state of medical care in Guyana. The recent death of a loved one brought into focus the professional and ethical limitations of private doctors and medical institutions in Guyana. Medical care is beyond the reach of the poor; those who scrape enough to visit a private doctor are more often than not exposed to misdiagnoses, unnecessary and exorbitantly priced diagnostic tests for which doctors often fail to properly interpret and treat patients accordingly.

For instance, my deceased relative had gone to a popular doctor at St Ann Street, New Amsterdam, complaining of chest pains and vomiting blood. The doctor prescribed an ECG and lipid panel blood work. However, he failed to see the clearly indicated high ST Elevation and low pulse rate of the ECG and failed to exercise due diligence, recommending any biomarkers test to rule out any cardiac distress. He mistreated the patient for gastric pain.
The patient was rushed the same night to Dr. Balwant Singh’s Hospital complaining of and physically indicating pain in the chest area. The attending physician recommended an ECG and treated the patient for gastritis. Again the ECG was misread and the doctor later revealed that the patient was not symptomatic of cardiac distress.

The patient died a week later at the same hospital after emergency procedures showed that he had multivessel blockage and a totally calcified left anterior descending artery. The same doctor, in a meeting a week later, presented an ECG result that’s dubious and highly questionable at best and also revealed that the patient had the vitals of an athletic young man. Any semi-literate person can see something manifestly wrong with this picture.
I am sure that this particular case mirrors myriad others and the obvious and pertinent questions swirling around it are: how can doctors so blatantly misread an objective diagnostic test?

Are they not trained to look beyond subjective responses patients purportedly gave them? Is there any collusion between private doctors and hospitals which are inimical to the public’s interest? Guyanese must, out of necessity, prod their health care providers with questions since many are either incompetent or negligent or both.

Regards
Satrohan Mahadeo