Bell the Cat: Quack medical doctors have evaded the profession

OPINION | Badru Walusansa | With all ills bedeviling the Uganda’s health sector, Ugandans cannot afford to add quack medical doctors on the long list. It’s quite disheartening to learn of quack medical doctors flooding the market. The NBS investigative story recently tipped us with a quack medical doctor who had masqueraded as professional for close 10 years.

The fellow duped the unsuspecting public often performing major surgical operations. He was also a superintendent of one health center in Kasangati. While watching this investigative story, one couldn’t help to think about many things whose answers cannot be established easily.

For starters, whereas one could arguably say the buck stops with the ministry of health as the regulator of the health sector, unfortunately, it was among those duped by the quack doctor in question. In fact at one point the ministry was the employer of this quack doctor who fraudulently beat the system to obtain various positions using fake documents obtained through impersonation.

To put this in perspective, it’s not surprising that there are high numbers of surgical mortality. A report titled surgical outcomes in Eastern Uganda, published in 2018, revealed that 84% laparotomies and cesarean sections were conducted by doctors without specialist training in surgery and over 97% of anesthetics were performed by non-physician anesthesia providers.

In most cases, we tend to sugarcoat medical incompetence as sheer negligence at the expense of life. Imagine, the high cost of health care in this country being compounded by quacks who without shame are busy making wrong diagnoses and administering wrong prescriptions to patients.

More excruciatingly we have all, if not, we shall soon all end in the unsafe hands of quack doctors. By the way, if we are not very careful to address this monster, whether rich or poor there is a quack medical doctor waiting to send you six-feet under in just a blink of an eye.

While it’s also public knowledge that there are quacks in every field, at least, let it not be the health sector. Two years ago, media reports burst rackets of quack medical practitioners who were involved in some form of medical tourism. These often made it a business to qualify patients with minor ailments for surgery. In rather extreme circumstances, patients who would be detected as well to do, would be sent abroad under brokerage understanding for treatment that would otherwise be administered by the local health facilities.

Out of personal experience, face-value in health service care is not enough to detect what is quack or the antithesis. Surely, I narrowly survived a quack doctor in our of the most sophisticated and highly ranked health care facilities (name withheld) where one doctor – who for all intents and purposes – I still refer to as a quack doctor gave me wrong diagnosis only to be dismissed after seeking three more medical opinions elsewhere.

But all said and done, we need to demand the ministry of health to take charge and strip us off this problem is slowly finishing us. I also think we need to empower the public with sufficient information reduced into precautions on how to detect quacks in the health profession lest we continue losing trust in it. The ministry should also come out to sensitize the public on where to report quacks if they are to be pruned out of the system.

Unlike other things, there is no alternative to better healthcare, we should therefore rise to the occasion whenever it’s threatened – like it has now – with the evasion of quack doctors.

****

The writer Mr. Badru Walusansa is a Policy Analyst