Why The Doctors’ Strike In Ghana May Be A Blessing (Part Two)

Anecdotes, Myths And True Cure

By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo

Following the recent strike action embarked upon by the Ghana Medical Association, Dr. Emmanuel Adom Winful, President of that august body, is said to have asked striking doctors to “step-up their industrial action by not attending to emergencies.” He categorically stated, “Members are informed to continue with the strike action in our own interest until all the major issues are resolved. Members are instructed to step-up with the strike action by not attending to emergencies. After all, this is not the first time people are dying. People die every day in hospitals.”

This cynical statement, coming as it were from a medical doctor sworn to the Hippocratic oath, has shocked the national consciousness and led to questions about the ethical commitment of the typical Ghanaian doctor. But what most people do not know is that what Dr. Winful said encapsulates the general attitude of the typical Ghanaian doctor: reckless abandonment of his ethical duty coupled with a sense of deity and a crass contempt for his patients. The typical Ghanaian doctor is a person who might have entered the profession not to save lives but to use it as a conduit for self-laudation, monetary graft, orgiastic purgation, narcissistic postulation and sheer wanton hubris-a person who may have been selected to pursue medicine not because of any intrinsic love for the profession but because he was a top student in a science class and was urged on to pursue medicine by an illiterate society to which the title of “Medical Doctor” mistakenly connotes the apogee of academic scholarship. In self-repudiation and frustration that their genius is totally misdirected, such doctors could become mere charlatans and agents of death…..But more importantly, Dr. Winful’s statement that “After all, this is not the first time people are dying. People die every day in hospitals,” affirms what many discerning Ghanaians have known all along: that our doctors are mere enablers of death, and not of healing, and that a person who will die will die anyway with or without a doctor. Two weeks before I migrated to the USA in 2002, a poor woman came knocking on my door in the middle of the night, saying that her daughter’s stomach was swelling. I drove the young lady to the Koforidua Central Hospital in my own car, willing and able to pay all expenses as I was wont to do. On arrival, the doctor’s attitude was completely nonchalant. He calmly asked us to wait in front of the consulting room whilst he engaged in conversation with his girlfriend. While people were lined up in the middle of the night for emergency care, this doctor was chatting with his girlfriend! After nearly two hours of waiting, I stormed the doctor’s office and demanded that he treated the young lady or else she would die. The doctor then called security and I was forcibly escorted from the hospital. The following day, the poor woman came to my house wailing pitifully. According to her, the doctor continued chatting with his girlfriend for another two hours, until the young lady collapsed in front of the consulting room and died……. Another time, an old lady I knew and loved was rushed to the hospital after heart attack. There was an argument about which doctor was responsible to attend to her; and for over two hours, the matter was not resolved. I later learned that the doctor on duty had taken off to see a girlfriend. When the senior doctor finally decided to attend to the old lady, it was too late; the lady died.

I know of a person who was in a coma for six days; all attempts to resuscitate him failed, until the doctors gave him up for dead and stopped his medication and intravenous infusions. Then he recovered; it turned out that the doctors had given him an overdose of sleeping pills, and his diabetic disposition also made him vulnerable to the intravenous infusion. This guy went to the hospital with high fever but came out crippled after his long coma induced by overdose of sleeping pills. He was lucky to come out alive though!

After posting the first part of this series, a woman wrote to me from Canada: “Hello Dr Sarfo, I read your article on GhanaWeb. So true what you say about doctors. I had brain surgery to remove a benign brain tumour in January 2009 here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and now I am wheelchair bound because I cannot walk, and I was walking before the surgery. I had physical therapy and all that but I still cannot walk. The neurosurgeon I think messed up my nerves during the surgery. I have since met two people who are also in the same boat, they had surgery too - one to remove a tumor from her spine. My sister had surgery, to remove fibroids in a clinic, in Paris, France and she gets infected with the hepatitis virus and she dies from it three months later.

I am like you. I am also scared of doctors now. I have had so many misdiagnosis.”

So if no less a person than Dr. Winful, the President of the Ghana Medical Association, states that “After all, this is not the first time people are dying. People die every day in hospitals,” we must believe him; he knows exactly what he is talking about; our hospitals are a place where Ghanaians go to die, and the doctors’ strike does nothing to worsen any situation. People die every day in hospitals when there is no reason for them to die!!

And this is probably in tandem with the original purpose of orthodox medicine as historically established: Doctors were not required to cure any diseases. The profession was originally set up to husband people to their deaths with less pain and grief. Hospitals were therefore hospices where people went to die in dignity.

In Moliere’s play called “Love is the Best Doctor”, the French playwright took a swipe at the mythical claims and palpable incompetence of the doctors of the day. While the doctor of a rich man feigned sickness because she wanted to marry her beloved instead of someone else imposed on her by her father, the doctors were busy competing with each other over convoluted medical terminology and fake diagnoses. The doctors in Ghana are no different from the celebrated charlatans in Moliere’s play.

But let’s face it, the whole notion of orthodox medicine is alien to the Ghanaian culture. Our herbs are more curative than many of those dangerous drugs pushed on us through conventional medicine. When I was seven years old, I suffered from severe jaundice which made my urine so yellowish that it actually stained the sand. When I was taken to the hospital, I was given a lot of pills and barred from eating salt. When my condition worsened, my mother took me to a herbalist who gave me a lot of concoction. I was thereafter cured of jaundice, and the disease never reappeared.

In 2005, I drove a total of two thousand and seven hundred miles from Austin, Texas to Bronx, New York, to visit my nephew, only stopping briefly to eat junk food and to drink large quantities of soda. Upon return, I fell seriously sick and was taken to the hospital where I was diagnosed with Type Two Diabetes. I was supposed to test my sugar level and self-inject insulin twice a day, while I stayed on strange diets recommended by the hospital’s dietician. After barely a month, I abandoned all the stupid prescriptions and recommendations and reverted to Ghanaian food and a modicum of physical exercises, while taking some herbal concoction sent over to me from Ghana by my uncle. My health improved so dramatically that I could not belive it; so I sought validation from another doctor. He told me point blank that my condition never required an insulin injection in the first place, and that I should rather take the pill Actos once a day. After taking Actos dialy for a month, I could not detect any difference in my health. I therefore abandoned the prescription and stuck to my diet, exercise and herbs. I have not been to the hospital for the past five years, and I am as fit as a fiddle! People even mistake me for a thirty-year old! As for Actos, I recently learned that taking it is one sure way to get bladder cancer! So the secret to our health and well-being has never lain with the doctors; it certainly lies with our natural healing methods and god-given herbs. Doctors are not supposed to cure diseases anyway; they are supposed to treat them. Remember also that medicine is no science but merely practice, mostly based on trial and error. If in doubt, consider that doctors cannot cure major diseases like the common cold, cancer, diabetes, Aids, heart diseases, tuberculosis and many others; they can only treat them. If doctors indeed cured diseases, shine your eyes and look at America: the country spends the highest amount of money on her health care system but her citizens have an aggregate of more dangerous diseases than any other nation. It appears that what that country spends to treat diseases is inversely proportional to the effect on the general health of the people. This may also be the case in Ghana……

And I daresay that our people are not afflicted by diseases the way the world wants us to believe. Our real disease is poverty. In Ghana, we go to the hospitals for treatment of poverty-induced diseases like measles, hooping cough, cholera, typhoid fever, malaria, dysentery, river blindness, guinea worm disease, boil ….all brought about by bad hygiene, bad water, filthy environment and bad food. All the foregoing diseases are preventable by the improvement in the living condition, and even if not, they are curable by our own herbs. Thus instead of depending on orthodox medicine with its concomitant side effects, we must go back to our traditional healers and examine how best to improve upon their methods. Therein lie the secrets to our cure, not in those doctors trained in lobotomized methods of western medicine.

And in pursuit of the traditional Ghanaian healing methods that have been proven to cure and not to merely treat, the present doctors’ strike offers a unique opportunity; let us set up healing institutions based on our unique culture and environmental endowments and needs, and we can overcome the mythical claims of orthodox medicine which sells us nothing but diseases and death. Dr. Winful is certainly right: “People die every day in hospitals”. But happily for many Ghanaians, people live every day by use of our traditional curative methods. We must re-discover them, refine them and pass them on.

Samuel Adjei Sarfo, Juris Doctor, lives in Austin, Texas. You can email him at [email protected]