Take Two

The Doc Is Not Always Right

Madhavankutty Pillai | 02 Sep, 2011

Dr Naresh Trehan believes, all too conveniently, in fasting miracles

During the Anna Hazare fast, this was an image on television: Dr Naresh Trehan, flanked by three doctors to the left and three doctors to the right. There might have been more, but the screen had space for only so many doctors at one time. They were dressed for the occasion— each had a stethoscope twined around his neck. It was good caricature. You don’t see many doctors with stethoscopes around their necks in hospitals, but in movies and television serials they are always like this—nothing must be left to doubt.

You can debate what the Indian public gained in concrete terms from Anna Hazare’s fast, but what is absolutely unquestionable is the mileage Naresh Trehan and Medanta Medicity, a private hospital, got from becoming court physicians to the new Father of the Nation. If Medanta was a listed company, its market cap would have doubled by now. Such enthralling free publicity is perhaps also the reason why Dr Trehan started making absurd statements after the fast. Consider quote number one as reported in the newspapers: “He (Anna) has some power in him, which helped him regulate his fluids, and he was able to maintain his balance.” If Dr Trehan had just hopped across on the stage and asked Medha Patkar, who knows a little more about fasting than he does, she would have told him that any otherwise well fed and healthy body could have pulled along without food like Anna for 12 days. She herself went on a fast for nine days in May. Or is it possible that all activists and politicians, who go on fasts all the time in India, are privy to this secret knowledge of “regulating fluid and maintaining balance”?

Quote number two is worse: “Medical science may not fully understand, but it is ‘brahmachari shakti’ and truly he has managed to live on his own reserves…” It’s amusing to see such an affidavit on medical science’s ignorance. Gandhi believed in brahmacharya, but that still doesn’t make it true. Sublimated sperm power has been the oldest obsession in this sex-starved country, and there is not an iota of evidence to show sperm converts to energy in an invisible factory in the testicles. But let’s not begrudge the doctor; courtiers must agree with kings and reason can go take a walk in the general ward.