Sunday, April 20, 2008 Lim: The dark side By Melanie T. Lim Wide Awake
GIVEN the opportunity, would you defile a human being lying unconscious and vulnerable in front of you? Would you cross to the dark side?
Well, the attending nurses, doctors, interns and curious onlookers apparently did at the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (VSMMC) last Jan. 3. As the anesthetized Jan-Jan lay unconscious with a deodorant canister stuck in his rectum, the attending team of medical practitioners feasted their eyes on his unfortunate predicament. But looking was not enough. The procedure had to be filmed for friend and foe to see.
After the foreign body was pulled out, someone yelled, “Baby out!” The surgeon, then reportedly sprayed the contents of the bottle into the snickering and hollering crowd. The short film then made the rounds via mobile phone to the drooling voyeuristic public. One day, a bright young thing decided to upload the 3-minute film to YouTube for the world to see.
This appalling incident should serve as a wake-up call to the medical community.
Granted that you perform many life-saving tasks for which many of us are grateful for, your list of professional lapses is growing long while the forbearance of your patients is wearing thin. Aside from the needlessly long waits in your clinics and unprofessional behavior of your receptionists, one of the greatest sins you commit is your abdication from humanity displayed by your loss of respect for the human body.
This sin was in prominent display last Jan. 3 at the VSMMC.
While many leaders of the medical community have been up in arms expressing their disgust over the VSMMC incident, the entire medical community should take this opportunity to take an honest evaluation of their own sense of humanity. Do you practice humility, compassion, empathy and tact when you treat your patients? When you interview them? When you convey your findings to them? When you perform procedures on them?
It is easy to forget after the nth body you poke that the human body before you belongs to a human being. Whether you are a professional or student in the medical profession, do not abdicate from your sense of humanity because you are tired, underpaid, overworked and sleep deprived. Your discomfort is no excuse for the debasement of the human body—a human body that belongs to a human being who deserves neither your derision nor decadence.
You have been given a gift to heal, to save and to prolong life. Do not defile God’s gift by committing unspeakable atrocities. The patient before you is ill, afraid, confused, in pain and perhaps, dying. There is no excuse for sloppiness or scorn, prejudice or patronage, arrogance or apathy.
We may not all be guilty of making a movie out of someone’s pain or predicament but we cannot disavow guilt from having laughed, snickered or hollered over someone’s ailment or anatomy. We don’t have to be members of the medical profession to be guilty of losing our humanity.
