Reflections on Medicine and Life by Dr. S.P. Kalantri
Clinical stories and reflections on evidence-based medicine, research, and patient care.
Four minutes into a talk about how to die well, the light went out. A physician’s account of scripting, filming, and uploading a talk on ageing and end-of-life conversations for family physicians across India — and what the gadgetry, at seventy, turned out to teach him.
More medicine is not always better medicine. A physician on why scanning healthy hearts often does more harm than the disease it’s hunting for.
“I’ve done more than 30,000 tubectomies,” my classmate said over tea in Sevagram today. The number hung in the air between us. We are both from GMC Nagpur’s 1973 batch. But my friend wasn’t a postgraduate gynaecologist or a surgeon — just a plain MBBS doctor. In the early 1980s, he quit his surgical postgraduate … Read the essay
She walked into my outpatient clinic carrying a file thicker than a city telephone directory. She was forty, stood five-foot-two, and weighed 130 kilograms. Her blood sugars were soaring, her blood pressure was dangerously high, and her serum creatinine—a marker of how well the kidneys are holding up—was creeping north. A recent ultrasound showed her … Read the essay
Yesterday, I wrote about the miracle pill that found a home in every drawer and pocket. Today, I reflect on the post-miracle buzz—the warnings about its darker side, from weakened bones to fading B12 stores, and the delicate balance of clinical care.