EDITORIAL
"Half" a doctor is worse than none
Isac Jorge Filho
ECBC-SP
"Half a doctor Is
better than none."
This phrase has been repeated by those who defend the absurd thesis of bringing foreign doctors to Brazil without assessing their knowledge and skills. It became even more used when written by the journalist Helium Schwartsman in an article written in Folha de São Paulo. The scorn for the quality was so strong that it led the President of Ribeirão Preto Medical Center, Dr. Cleoza Cascaes Dias, to cancel her long-lasting subscription of that newspaper. It is really disgusting to those who experience medicine and its ills in Brazil to hear and read so misleading statements on the part of the trendsetters. "Half" a doctor has no medical value. Instead, it has a negative value, being a hazardous agent, capable of killing or inflicting sequelae to people through ignorance of basic principles and inability to perform fundamental procedures. This subject requires several aspects to be discussed. Today we lay down two.
The first concerns the idea that some try to impinge upon the nation that our health problems are due to the low number of physicians, and therefore will be solved simply by raising the number of professionals. They want us to believe that increasing the total number of doctors will solve the larger problem, which is their distribution. They are not very interested in knowing why doctors lack small and peripheral medical centers and abound in larger ones.
They want us to believe that in the XXIst century medicine is still practiced by the heroic ancient doctors, who made what was possible, without aids or equipment. What they really want to peripheral populations is medicine one century late. Even worse, they want medicine to be exercised by persons of so dubious qualifications that they do not want them to be subjected to qualification exams.
They do not want to see that efficiency in a public health system depends not only on doctors, but on a multi structure (no one heard anything about bringing in foreign nurses, physiotherapists, psychologists and many others) and a public health service organization, including the existence of essential basic equipment and a career system that encourages professionals to join in, as it already exists in other professions.
What is the use of putting a doctor in a small town and not give him/her minimum working conditions, even sutures or modest X-ray devices? And we're still thinking of a doctor trained in an authorized medical school and supervised by the "competent" ministries? The "competent" here is in quotes. And it must be so, for what can be said of ministries who give of their prerogative of supervision and quality control, proposing hiring foreign doctors without going through qualifying exams? Actually, this shows that they are not interested in having whole doctors, "half" doctor is enough. It seems that is what they want for the health of Brazilians: numbers, not quality.
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
29 Oct 2013 -
Date of issue
Aug 2013
