The Yemeni Medical Pie [Archives:2007/1053/Community]
By: Sameer Ahmed Al-Nuzaili
[email protected]
We get to talk about financial and administrative corruption of some persons or institutions. But I can ensure you that there is no corruption worst than our country medical corruption. In the financial one, they steal people's money. But in the medical corruption, they steal people's life.
Moreover, in financial corruption, people always know the felons and all the details of their crimes, how they do it and when. But in the medicine world, unfortunately, people still have a little medical awareness and have always one suspect and one pretext that is the fate. This unlucky fate if he could speak even for once, I think, he will scream saying: “You creating me, fools!.”
The daily spread up of corruption in hospitals and private clinics is one of the most tragic types of corruption in all human history. That is because it, firstly, exploits citizens' ignorance of the basic elements in that profession which no one knows but the experts.
Secondly, it takes advantage of a critical human position in which a man could be in a weak condition with sensitive feelings that could push him to sell even his own clothes in order to get money to save the life of his child, wife, or parents.
Thirdly, which is the most influenced one, it is enhanced by doctors' mentality and conduct. Though doctors, who are supposed to be well-educated men, know in advance that the patients do not have the main sustenance of daily life, they rip them off in cold blood.
The treatment, in most medical institutions in Yemen today, is naked and open for all. Since whatever the disease is, the doctor will ask the patients to do a chain of laboratorial tests as well as x-rays, of course after s/he pinpoints accurately where the patient must do these tests. Then, s/he will name the only pharmacy in the whole world that the patient can buy the drugs from.
Regarding drugs, 93% of the them are multivitamins and usually are not necessary for the exact disease. But, who cares. Even pharmacists want to sell as much as possible of their expired and smuggled drugs. Since both doctors and pharmacists shape one team and share the same pie.
Little noble doctors confess that the problem starts with their bosses whom make a condition in order to keep them working, they have to send all patients to buy a lot of drugs and do many tests. For, the bosses consider their medical institutions as a completely commercial investment.
Such medical institutions are sinking with illegal breaches with no observation or supervision from the responsible Health Ministry Bodies which are busy all the time with some important non-medical matters.
If the ministry makes a study on the delivery conditions which happened in all private medical institutions, they will come to find that more than 97% of pregnant women were subjected to Hysterotomy operations. Not because Yemeni women are infected with specific disease but, of course, because the charges of these operations are 13 times more than normal birth.
Consequently, it is true that there is a queue of medical corruption who has no conscience, no supervisors, no aims, but collecting money whatever the issue will be. This is ensured by health organizations' reports which referred most of death conditions, in Yemen, to medical mistakes and negligence as well as to the absence of health awareness among citizens,who accept the so-called fate and entomb their relatives saliently.
At large, I would like to invite Yemeni youth to be aware of such inhuman exploitation and dirty corruption. Since youth are half of today and all of tomorrow, they should Improve their health knowledge and spread it up in their environment so that the future pie may be clean and healthy.
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