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Doc in a book
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Precision and ease are important in both surgery and writing, say two doctors who have authored an accessible health guide
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Technology is often rated over human skill in the field of medicine. — Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy
YOU KNOW who's the best doctor in town to treat the wart on your left toe and the black spot that has appeared bang on the bridge of your nose. But you just don't know where to look when you have a common cold or a headache.
The blind spots
Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed write in their introduction to A Compendium of Family Health: "As the territory of expertise narrows, the blind spot covers just about everything else. Undoubtedly, the area in focus is brightly illuminated with inspired knowledge, but its very brightness forces the periphery into obscurity." The compendium (Rupa & Co., Rs. 395) hopes to shed some light on these blind spots by providing basic information on health and illnesses in a language accessible to the common man.
Holistic approach
The two doctor-authors are in the field for decades and are shocked by the compartmentalisation of the human being specialisation has brought with it, where "a toe nail and kidney receive extra special attention at the cost of the whole person". Making a fervent appeal for a holistic approach to health, they write: "We were all trained in the Hippocratic ideal of providing skilled help and solace to the distressed. We were trained to treat people, not body parts... That ineffable quality, the human spirit, unifies the pixels of information about the human body." The book seeks to "reacquaint you with your earliest acquaintance — your body."
Dr. Ishrat and Dr. Kalpana, in an e-mail interview with MetroPlus, say that a book of this kind becomes important at a time when "people rate technology higher than human skills", and in the process, forget to feel the pulse of their own bodies. "But there ought to be more communication: you ought to understand what your body is trying to tell you through small everyday discomforts, besides just knowing what to do in a crisis. Popping a pill has become an automatism, like Pavlov's drooling dog. Our book is meant to help the reader think his way towards a more intelligent solution."
With over 1,000 entries in the alphabetical order, A Compendium... could prove a handy guide for a family to reach out to in a moment of medical crisis. The listings, done in an alphabetical order, range from "Headache" to "Helicobacter Pylori".
There are several Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) thrown in to make the book user-friendlier. Even while it discusses every entry threadbare, the book repeatedly tells you that there is no substitute for "seeing" a doctor. The book has a section on drug groups too, "meant to guide, not prescribe". The book underlines: "There is no safe drug that you can medicate yourself with."
Strikingly simple in style, A Compendium... can be understood by a person least acquainted with medical jargon. Though it does not skip medical terminology altogether, it makes it a point to explain each in a layman's language.
Say Dr. Kalpana and Dr. Ishrat: "Any doctor worth his salt will never speak to his patient in jargon. It is like conversing with a resident of Dharavi in Latin. The standards of good writing are the same, irrespective of who the writer is or what one is writing about. Incidentally, surgery and writing demand similar skills: ease and precision. Words misused can wound and the scalpel used expertly is poetry. Jargon has no place in either."
The book is available at all leading bookshops.
BAGESHREE S.
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