I was just reading about Moumita Debnath. She was a medical student in Kolkata (Calcutta) India. Earlier this month she was raped and murdered at the college she was attending.
A suspect has been arrested but there are protests surrounding the crime. Some people are saying the police bungled the investigation and may be intentionally covering up for the real criminals. Others are saying this crime shows that India needs to give more protection to women.
But what I’m wondering about is a large number of doctors who are saying this crime is part of a pattern of violence against doctors.
Is that a thing in India? If so, what is happening? Why are people targeting doctors? Is this going on in other countries?
The only violence against doctors I’m aware of it anti-abortion extremists targeting doctors and other staff at clinics that perform abortions.
Attacks on doctors in hospitals are common in India. Last month, doctors in New Delhi went on strike after an assault on a hospital by dozens of people, many of them relatives of a woman who died during surgery after giving birth.
From the article linked above:
…a mob of 50 to 70 armed people stormed the premises of the hospital, vandalising property on Tuesday morning. The accused also attacked staff members.
A patient died during a surgery after she gave birth to a child on Monday night. This angered the patient’s attendants and they attacked doctors on Tuesday morning.
Considering the pervasive patterns of violence against women in India, I’m not sure how you could tell whether it’s because she was a doctor or because she was a woman, unless there’s some kind of smoking gun type event- like she treated someone who turned around and died, and the mob was angry about that.
A good and careful pilot, flying non-experimental craft, can expect to bring them all down safely. But some patients are going to die no matter how good and how careful the doctor is.
Killing doctors when a patient dies seems likely to lead, not to accountability, but to having no doctors at all.
Like I said, not a good way. It was a joke. As you say, patients die every day and just because a medic was nearby doesn’t mean they caused it. Hell, they may have heroically prevented postponed that death for years, weeks, or hours.
There seems to be a habit in India for folks to assemble mobs of angry people based on nothing more than rumor who then set upon some business, building, or person to wreak destruction. What’s up with that as a general social phenomenon, regardless of what they’re angry about or who they’re angry at?
Or is their news reporting just better at discovering and talking about these things than news in other places, including the USA?
In Canada, something like 70% of emergency doctors and nurses have been victims of patient violence. I have seen a doctor beaten to a pulp after failing to revive a moribund patient. Hospitals are often surprisingly sanguine about these abuses, and rarely want to deal with them to an acceptable degree. It can be an intense place dealing with unstable and stressful situations and brittle people, even before throwing in things like drugs, alcohol and other factors.
So in a country where there are thousands of incidents against women, including socially and religiously tolerated retribution? Not at all surprising this is an emerging issue. Good on the medical community for standing with the victim.
Reading some articles, I’m beginning to think the issues may be mixed. Apparently in India, a majority of doctors and nurses are women. So if there are misogynists who are prone to violence against women in general, they might target the medical profession in particular because it is a group of successful women.