A doctor attached to the Karapitiya Hospital in Galle has raised a hornet’s nest particularly among his fellow physician colleagues with an announcement that he has discovered some sort of miracle “capsule” cure for Covid-19.
Dr. Rukshan Bellana, ever the maverick in the medical community, was among the first to come out in public and decry the marketing efforts of this adventurist physician who claimed he discovered the miracle remedy. But not stopping there, Dr. Bellana took some rather devastating swipes at the medical community hierarchy saying that the association representing the physicians of the country in Government service, was also probably part of the “mafia” that was encouraging these “sensationalist quack cures” that did have the approval of any accredited authority.
It has to be said that for its part the GMOA took out notices in national newspapers basically disowning the claim for a “miracle cure” from a doctor among their ranks. The press announcement categorically stated that the GMOA does not approve of any so-called medicinal remedy that does not have the approval of the NMRA (the National Medicines Regulatory Authority).
However, Bellana’s bold remarks and similar recent occurrences such as some doctors giving approval earlier during the pandemic for the so-called Ayurvedic Dhammika Peniya concoction shows that there are cracks developing within the ranks of physicians. They are not all necessarily speaking in one voice any more, and there are factions — that Bellana referred to uncharitably as mafias — that are more interested in charting their own course, than in following the official line of the GMOA.
That situation may be concerning to doctors, but among members of the public there may be some private joy even when they see medical practitioners going their own ways and deviating from the GMOA line. To paraphrase the old saying, this setting-in of dissenting opinion among physicians’ ranks ‘could not have happened to a set of nicer guys’.
Let’s face it. Ordinary people are not enamoured by doctors uniting for ‘their causes’. They have had a tough time dealing with doctors striking and crippling hospitals in the past, in the pursuit of various demands such as the closure of new-fangled private medical schools.
Though the doctors’ associations have opined that all these strikes have been carried out to ensure that people can continue to have faith in the competence of the medical profession, the general public has not bought those explanations. On the contrary, ordinary people have often seen practitioners of allopathic medicine in this country as being aggressively self-centred.
They have also come to consider at least certain sections of the medical profession as being rapacious and money-minded. Specialists who they see as minting money and not necessarily giving patients the time and attention they seek, have been viewed by the general public as being selfish and unconcerned about the general public good.
Enter the pandemic in 2020, and all the issues that are tied to a cataclysmic event that had tremendous repercussions on the lives of ordinary people. Doctors became oracles under these circumstances, because citizens were hanging on their every pronouncement to glean some wisdom about the direction in which their lives were heading.
However, medical practitioners as a collective didn’t seem to acquit themselves too well in the public eye in this regard. The pandemic was a new event. Ordinary citizens were at sea. They looked to doctors for guidance about lockdowns, and all other public health issues that were new to them and had resulted from this new health-related development.
The consensus then was that the politicians and the decision makers should take their cues from the doctors. But, by all accounts – though the leadership of the physicians organisations would deny it strenuously – the doctors disappointed massively.
The common refrain on the streets now is that if the country still functions with dozens of deaths per day as a result of the coronavirus, why did the medical professionals force the country into a lockdown in the early stages of the pandemic?
It was no ordinary shutdown of civilian life either. It went on for months, and the economy as a result was brought to a stage where it was teetering on the brink.
Not only did the physicians seem tone deaf to the travails of the masses as a result of this lockdown, they were also basically of the collective opinion that if the disease was contained at the early stage in this way – Sri Lanka would by and large be rid of Covid-19, and will never have to contend with the scourge on the long run.
How did all that turn out? Not very well, and that’s undeniable by any yardstick. The lengthy initial lockdown proved to be disastrous because it neither brought Covid-19 to an end in this country, or gave us the economic strength to contend with it.
On the contrary, Covid-19 returned in various so called intermittent waves, and people began to question the wisdom of the previous first lockdown in 2020, which only seemed to have had the effect of creating needless havoc in the economy.
Medical professionals by and large stuck to their story that lockdowns are needed and still quite a number of them – a majority by all accounts – do. But the public is no longer prepared to accept medical wisdom undiluted, just because they are faced with a so-called health related calamity.
Some physicians are derisive. One of the office bearers of the GMOA – the writer is unable to identify him by name – was saying on TV, well, they are keeping everything open because of the economy, but how is the economy doing?
He seemed to be enjoying the fact that the economy is under-performing even though there are no lockdowns. If it’s underperforming that’s due to several reasons, such as the global economic slump due to the pandemic that had a devastating impact on our markets, and on tourism.
But the long shutdown encouraged by the doctors in the initial phase also is partly to blame at least for the current countrywide state of the economy, which is struggling to recover from that initial onslaught.
When the doctors are discordant and sometimes not speaking in one voice, the public reaction is of schadenfreude. At least they are not exactly feeling sorry for these folks, who set out to dictate terms to the populace on the health crisis, but seemed so totally out of their depth because whatever they said about the pandemic and it’s direction, did not happen.
That may not necessarily be the fault of physicians who are also dealing with a new virus which their community has not encountered before. Though the public is prepared to forgive them for their relative ignorance regarding the pandemic, they are not ready to forgive them for being so cocksure in the initial stages – to a point where the medical community inferred that their word should be law with regard to dealing with this new scourge.
People realised soon enough that though their precautionary tone and advice could be well meaning, that they didn’t have a clue on how the virus would behave and impact society at given times, or about how exactly the threat should be met; whether it’s by vaccination alone, or through vaccination combined with other countermeasures.
Minister Gamini Lokuge may have been wrong to challenge the doctors so openly about a local lockdown in Piliyandala, but the reason he was so bold to do so was that he knew the time had passed when people were prepared to follow the doctors’ diktat blindly.
If there was a learning curve about the pandemic, it seems the medical professionals had the steepest ascent on the graph. If some of them errantly support Ayurvedic doctors these days, or boast about discovering medicines –- and their colleagues fume as a result –- the people seem to smirk, shrug their shoulders knowingly, and get about their own business. They seem to have to come to consider that the physicians should, among other things, heal themselves.
(The writer is a former Editor-in-Chief of three national English language publications and a practicing Attorney-at-Law. He is an Editors’ Guild award-winning columnist, and contributing writer and columnist for the Nikkei Asian Review and South China Morning Post, while his editorials have been published in The Australian)Covid-19 and the unraveling of physicians’ credibility
12 May 2021
Covid-19 and the unraveling of physicians’ credibility
12 May 2021
A doctor attached to the Karapitiya Hospital in Galle has raised a hornet’s nest particularly among his fellow physician colleagues with an announcement that he has discovered some sort of miracle “capsule” cure for Covid-19.
Dr. Rukshan Bellana, ever the maverick in the medical community, was among the first to come out in public and decry the marketing efforts of this adventurist physician who claimed he discovered the miracle remedy. But not stopping there, Dr. Bellana took some rather devastating swipes at the medical community hierarchy saying that the association representing the physicians of the country in Government service, was also probably part of the “mafia” that was encouraging these “sensationalist quack cures” that did have the approval of any accredited authority.
It has to be said that for its part the GMOA took out notices in national newspapers basically disowning the claim for a “miracle cure” from a doctor among their ranks. The press announcement categorically stated that the GMOA does not approve of any so-called medicinal remedy that does not have the approval of the NMRA (the National Medicines Regulatory Authority).
However, Bellana’s bold remarks and similar recent occurrences such as some doctors giving approval earlier during the pandemic for the so-called Ayurvedic Dhammika Peniya concoction shows that there are cracks developing within the ranks of physicians. They are not all necessarily speaking in one voice any more, and there are factions — that Bellana referred to uncharitably as mafias — that are more interested in charting their own course, than in following the official line of the GMOA.
That situation may be concerning to doctors, but among members of the public there may be some private joy even when they see medical practitioners going their own ways and deviating from the GMOA line. To paraphrase the old saying, this setting-in of dissenting opinion among physicians’ ranks ‘could not have happened to a set of nicer guys’.
Let’s face it. Ordinary people are not enamoured by doctors uniting for ‘their causes’. They have had a tough time dealing with doctors striking and crippling hospitals in the past, in the pursuit of various demands such as the closure of new-fangled private medical schools.
Though the doctors’ associations have opined that all these strikes have been carried out to ensure that people can continue to have faith in the competence of the medical profession, the general public has not bought those explanations. On the contrary, ordinary people have often seen practitioners of allopathic medicine in this country as being aggressively self-centred.
They have also come to consider at least certain sections of the medical profession as being rapacious and money-minded. Specialists who they see as minting money and not necessarily giving patients the time and attention they seek, have been viewed by the general public as being selfish and unconcerned about the general public good.
Enter the pandemic in 2020, and all the issues that are tied to a cataclysmic event that had tremendous repercussions on the lives of ordinary people. Doctors became oracles under these circumstances, because citizens were hanging on their every pronouncement to glean some wisdom about the direction in which their lives were heading.
However, medical practitioners as a collective didn’t seem to acquit themselves too well in the public eye in this regard. The pandemic was a new event. Ordinary citizens were at sea. They looked to doctors for guidance about lockdowns, and all other public health issues that were new to them and had resulted from this new health-related development.
The consensus then was that the politicians and the decision makers should take their cues from the doctors. But, by all accounts – though the leadership of the physicians organisations would deny it strenuously – the doctors disappointed massively.
The common refrain on the streets now is that if the country still functions with dozens of deaths per day as a result of the coronavirus, why did the medical professionals force the country into a lockdown in the early stages of the pandemic?
It was no ordinary shutdown of civilian life either. It went on for months, and the economy as a result was brought to a stage where it was teetering on the brink.
Not only did the physicians seem tone deaf to the travails of the masses as a result of this lockdown, they were also basically of the collective opinion that if the disease was contained at the early stage in this way – Sri Lanka would by and large be rid of Covid-19, and will never have to contend with the scourge on the long run.
How did all that turn out? Not very well, and that’s undeniable by any yardstick. The lengthy initial lockdown proved to be disastrous because it neither brought Covid-19 to an end in this country, or gave us the economic strength to contend with it.
On the contrary, Covid-19 returned in various so called intermittent waves, and people began to question the wisdom of the previous first lockdown in 2020, which only seemed to have had the effect of creating needless havoc in the economy.
Medical professionals by and large stuck to their story that lockdowns are needed and still quite a number of them – a majority by all accounts – do. But the public is no longer prepared to accept medical wisdom undiluted, just because they are faced with a so-called health related calamity.
Some physicians are derisive. One of the office bearers of the GMOA – the writer is unable to identify him by name – was saying on TV, well, they are keeping everything open because of the economy, but how is the economy doing?
He seemed to be enjoying the fact that the economy is under-performing even though there are no lockdowns. If it’s underperforming that’s due to several reasons, such as the global economic slump due to the pandemic that had a devastating impact on our markets, and on tourism.
But the long shutdown encouraged by the doctors in the initial phase also is partly to blame at least for the current countrywide state of the economy, which is struggling to recover from that initial onslaught.
When the doctors are discordant and sometimes not speaking in one voice, the public reaction is of schadenfreude. At least they are not exactly feeling sorry for these folks, who set out to dictate terms to the populace on the health crisis, but seemed so totally out of their depth because whatever they said about the pandemic and it’s direction, did not happen.
That may not necessarily be the fault of physicians who are also dealing with a new virus which their community has not encountered before. Though the public is prepared to forgive them for their relative ignorance regarding the pandemic, they are not ready to forgive them for being so cocksure in the initial stages – to a point where the medical community inferred that their word should be law with regard to dealing with this new scourge.
People realised soon enough that though their precautionary tone and advice could be well meaning, that they didn’t have a clue on how the virus would behave and impact society at given times, or about how exactly the threat should be met; whether it’s by vaccination alone, or through vaccination combined with other countermeasures.
Minister Gamini Lokuge may have been wrong to challenge the doctors so openly about a local lockdown in Piliyandala, but the reason he was so bold to do so was that he knew the time had passed when people were prepared to follow the doctors’ diktat blindly.
If there was a learning curve about the pandemic, it seems the medical professionals had the steepest ascent on the graph. If some of them errantly support Ayurvedic doctors these days, or boast about discovering medicines –- and their colleagues fume as a result –- the people seem to smirk, shrug their shoulders knowingly, and get about their own business. They seem to have to come to consider that the physicians should, among other things, heal themselves.
(The writer is a former Editor-in-Chief of three national English language publications and a practicing Attorney-at-Law. He is an Editors’ Guild award-winning columnist, and contributing writer and columnist for the Nikkei Asian Review and South China Morning Post, while his editorials have been published in The Australian)Kapruka
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Discover Kapruka, the leading online shopping platform in Sri Lanka, where you can conveniently send Gifts and Flowers to your loved ones for any event. Explore a wide range of popular Shopping Categories on Kapruka, including Toys, Groceries, Electronics, Birthday Cakes, Fruits, Chocolates, Automobile, Mother and Baby Products, Clothing, and Fashion. Additionally, Kapruka offers unique online services like Money Remittance, Astrology, Medicine Delivery, and access to over 700 Top Brands. Also If you’re interested in selling with Kapruka, Partner Central by Kapruka is the best solution to start with. Moreover, through Kapruka Global Shop, you can also enjoy the convenience of purchasing products from renowned platforms like Amazon and eBay and have them delivered to Sri Lanka.Send love straight to their heart this Valentine's with our thoughtful gifts!