Hospitals often diagnose fake critical illness or serious injuries just to loot hapless patients

Gopal (not his real name) is a young techie working for a big software company in Chennai. One day, he was a bit late to office and was in a hurry. He was trying to park his two-wheeler with his helmet on which was not securely tied as usual. He slipped and fell on his face with the helmet strap cutting his upper lip. His friends got frightened on seeing blood gushing from the mouth and rushed him walking to a nearby five-star hi-tech hospital.

When they reached the hospital, Gopal was rushed into the intensive care unit (ICU) in a wheelchair, although he preferred to walk. No one was allowed inside the ICU for the whole day. Gopal was brainwashed that he had 'serious' head injury. Apparently, everything was normal—including the results of a battery of blood and urine tests. Despite all that, even his three-month-pregnant wife was not allowed to see him. They were told that Gopal was seriously ill and could become unconscious any minute and might throw a violent fit at any time. His life, they said, hangs by a thin thread! The anxious wife almost collapsed and became unconscious herself.

By then, it was late evening and his other relatives got scent of the incident: one of them was an influential man who works with hospitals in Chennai. He insisted on seeing the patient at any cost or else he would get the patient discharged against medical advice. The nursing staff relented and allowed him inside. Incidentally, no medical staff, above the rank of a duty doctor, had seen this ‘seriously’ ill patient whose life was said to be hanging by a thin thread (!) all day, as most of them were in Deepavali mood. What the relative saw there shook him up. It was a large A/C room. One side of the room was separated by a plastic sheet to keep contagious patients being quarantined and the other half was used for such 'fake' serious patients. The nurses refused to show him the CAT-scan and blood reports. Blood was still oozing from the wound and they had not stitched the torn lip wound yet, as they were waiting for their facio-maxillary surgeon who was  out for Deepavali holidays. In these hi-tech hospitals, even minor surgery had to be done by a sub-specialist!

It was too much for the relatives to keep him there, under the circumstances. They got the patient discharged against medical advice. The hospital insisted that they pay Rs25,000 on the spot as it is the minimum charge for any patient admitted to their intensive-care unit. The hospital refused to give any certificate or discharge summary for insurance purposes, as patients discharged against advice were not entitled to such luxuries!

This is the new ‘fakery’ syndrome that I am describing. Anyone who goes to the hospital becomes a patient. Most of them have minor ailments; the problems get exaggerated in these hospitals to fake into serious maladies to net a bigger booty from them.  

What worries me more is the way the hapless and anxious patients are further pushed into the bottomless pit of anxiety by labelling them as serious, where life hangs by a thin thread. Many a time, they even predict when the patient is going to die without a shred of scientific evidence to predict the unpredictable future of their patients. The last usually happens to cancer patients. The ‘wise’ doctors tell the patient that s/he has a only certain number of months to live and so on! Such scare generation is one of the novel methods of disease mongering. This fakery is the height of ‘health-scare system’ that prevails today. Would the powers that be take a call? Incidentally, our friend Gopal is fine on his own, a bit shaken, though, by the new experience.

“To fake it is to stand guard over emptiness.”—  Arthur Herzog.

Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS. He can be reached at [email protected]