Physician's prayer of Kaliyuga

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There is much ado about the deteriorating medical ethics these days. Not for nothing such things surface through the public eye. It is, more often than not, the common man who finds himself at the receiving end. Factors that have affected are too varied. But it is not entirely the fault of the doctor.

There used to be (not sure about it now) a chart displayed in a doctors' clinics titled "The Physician's Prayer" containing four sentences. Controversial things related to the medical profession keep falling on our ears, too frequent for comfort, leaving the mind confused, and has probably turned the original Physician's Prayer absurd. The modified (in parenthesis) "kaliyuga prayer" would read thus:

~~Dear Lord, thou Great Physician, I kneel before thee (in spite of my ego), since every good and perfect gift (who else, from my patients) must come from thee, I pray (in spite of my tight schedule at various hospitals and clinics).

~~Give skill to my hands (to prescribe costly drugs), clear vision to my mind (to pretend to deeply study all those expensive and complicated test reports/results), kindness (to divert most of my patients only to 'star' hospitals where I have 'links') and sympathy (hey, what is that?) to my heart.

~~Give singleness of purpose (to amass money swindled from patients poor and rich), strength to lift at least a part (nay, most part) of the burden of my suffering fellow-men (of course, with their wealth) and a true realization of the privilege that is mine (after all, I have paid hefty sums of donations/fees for my education and invested lakhs for sophisticated equipments).

~~Take from my heart all guile and worldliness that with the simple faith of a child I may rely on thee (not applicable!).

The first of 291 aphorisms that Dr. Samuel Hahnemann (founder of Homoeopathy) wrote in his "Organon of Medicine" (early 18th century) says : "The physician's high and only mission is to restore the sick to health, to cure, as it is termed." That shows how high he held the patients' health. The patients' predicament in recent times would have been so very different had the medical practitioners seriously carried forward that legacy. Alas! that was not to be. There may still be a few exceptions around of such ilk as late Dr. MN Jayaram (of Vonti Koppal, Mysore) but they are like pins in a huge haystack. The highly sophisticated equipments have made the highly qualified doctors to suffer from intellectual constipation, allowing monetary greed to get the better of all things. Is there any "cure" for this? The victim is always the hapless common man, who is, more often than not, left in the lurch looking for financial resources!

What a paradox to the very basic principle of this noble profession!

P.S. [Dr.SV Subramanya of Chamarajapuram is another name alongside Dr.Jayaram]