Twisted Medical Facts

The British Medical Journal recently noted that Indian movies are the only place where a doctor could feel the pulse of a woman and tell her that she was pregnant. While this may be a glaring example of how much the Indian movies are out of touch with the ground realities of modern medicine, sadly it is not the only one.

Traumatic amnesia

Take the example of the often repeated formula of a movie where the "Hero" takes a hit on his head and promptly forgets everything about himself. This is a kind of propaganda that has taken a Goebbelsian proportion because it remains a fact that only a person with psychogenic amnesia loses his personal information like name and age and not someone with traumatic amnesia.

Even if one were to agree that psychogenic amnesia were secondary to trauma, one can hardly justify the treatment that is propounded wherein a suitably directed hit at the same spot under similar circumstances would promptly put the patient back on the path to recovery. Far from being the kiss (or is it the stroke) of life it might be the last nail in the patient's coffin.

This is exactly the kind of treatment that Sir Robert Hutchison prays to god to deliver us from when he said, "From making the cure of a disease more grievous than its endurance." Among the other fallacies is the electro convulsive therapy that is grotesquely given the misnomer of "shock therapy." A highly refined therapeutic procedure done under tightly controlled circumstances is given the colour of a kind of torture which might send a chill down the spine of a tinpot dictator. Moreover it has specific indications and is not necessarily given every time someone tries to jump over the boundaries of a mental asylum.

Snake bite

One more instance of a movie setting a bad precedent is seen when someone in the movie is bitten by a snake. The events that follow a snake bite are nothing short of a pantomime. The one thing that a person must desist from is to try and suck the poison out from the site of snake bite. Though the intention might be right, it hardly serves the purpose and the act may cause the transmission of infection from the person's mouth to the already beleaguered patient.

It seems that a similar case can be made out for the film makers when they gently suggest to the gullible audience that eating papayas can cause abortion or that a tread-mill test is used to obtain an ElectroEncephaloGram(EEG) and not ElectroCardioGram(ECG). In fact the latter example was woven into the story line of a recent bollywood movie where the protagonist had a brain tumour.

Finally, I found that the film makers were outdone in this art of twisting medical facts by a section of politicians who are represented by a person who claimed at an international conference on AIDS at Bangkok that a holy dip in the river Ganga would rid a person of his malady. But then nothing less was expected of them.