Dilip arrived in my outpatient room and settled on the stool with the solemnity of a man about to announce something of national importance. “I have a stone in the gall bladder,” he declared. He did not sound like one in distress, but rather like someone unveiling a secret possession.
I leaned forward. “Yes, but what brings you here today? Where is the pain?”
Dilip ignored the question. His eyes wandered to the ceiling fan. “My left coronary artery is seventy percent blocked,” he said, as though trying to impress me with his knowledge of cardiology.
I pressed him further. “Chest pain? Sweating? Dizziness? Breathlessness”
He shook his head. “No. But my cholesterol is high.”
There was no story forthcoming—only sentences borrowed from a pathology report. Then he produced his iPhone 17, a shining specimen he seemed to admire more than his own pulse. “Look here, Doctor. My complete blood profile. A hundred tests.”
On the screen stretched thirty-five pages of figures. By the time I reached page five, I had forgotten what was on page one. “Why so many tests?” I asked.
“The lab gave a festival offer,” he replied cheerfully. “A hundred tests for twelve hundred rupees. A boy came home, took the blood, and before I had finished my lunch, the results were in my inbox. I didn’t even move from my chair.”
“That,” I told him, “is precisely the difficulty. You move little, eat plenty, and bring me a file of numbers in place of a tale.”
In my student days, the first lesson was simple: listen to the patient. The man would speak, the doctor would prod and poke, and gradually a story emerged. Investigations were meant to confirm the story, not replace it.
Now the order has reversed. The patient brings not his aches but a PDF, and my true struggle is not with disease, but with excess—too much scanning, too much measuring, too much of everything.
This is not the medicine we were taught. And sometimes I wonder: if this continues, will the patient himself vanish one day, leaving only his data to walk in through my door? And will I also be there in this virtual world? Or will I too be replaced by some machine that calls itself a doctor?
