Storytellers

Sexism in medicine : The eternal confusion and the innocent mistake. Srimathi Gopalakrishnan I came across a blog post yesterday that talked about how female physicians have been repeatedly mistaken for and addressed as nurses or other health care professionals for ages now. Click here to read the article. It says, “ The persistence of sexism despite rising female representation indicates that the professional membership alone is insufficient”. I completely agree and I would be bold enough to say that the statement is still incomplete. We must understand that though increasing the numbers is an important way to fight the sexism, reducing the issue to just representative minority would be similar to treating the symptoms and not the disease. On taking a deeper look, one will realize that the real problem is the underlying patriarchy that stems into various forms of sexism, for example, the quick assumption that a female health care professional can only be a nurse -...

Covid-19 – call to put back people in the centre and not the disease Vijayaprasad Gopichandran and Sudharshini Subramaniam This blog is a different experiment. Sudharshini and I write our individual thoughts as two sub-blogs and then I synthesize our ideas to create a collective message. This is a follow up to our previous blog titled “ Social Distancing….you must be kidding me ”. 134 to home-isolation and many more to go… Sudharshini Subramaniam Tense and nervous patients were sitting in the Covid-19 isolation ward of my hospital. The government of Tamil Nadu has recently come out with an advisory for home isolation of patients with asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic or mildly symptomatic Covid-19. I walked in, part of a team of doctors, into the ward to see all of them, talk to them and triage them to identify those who can be sent for home isolation and those who need to be admitted into the hospital. The dominant feelings among all were fear, anxiety and worry. Al...