Reflections on Medicine and Life by Dr. S.P. Kalantri
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
“I am not sure what it is.” I utter these words whenever I encounter a medical puzzle I cannot solve. “This is beyond my competence,” I reply to the WhatsApp messages flooding my phone at all hours. My patients hate it. They do not visit a clinic to buy hesitation. They want a physician who … Read the essay
This afternoon I sat in a mall in Wardha and watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Near the end, Odysseus picks up the old bow that no suitor in his hall could bend, and strings it in one unhurried motion. The theatre went quiet. I had not expected that a film shot across six countries, on … Read the essay
A Sunday morning with the newspaper, an old habit not yet broken, turns up a curious coincidence: the same NEET topper claimed by two rival coaching institutes on consecutive front pages. A story about what medical entrance coaching in India has quietly become.
A woman of forty walks into my OPD. She complains of “gases.” Some acidity, she says, a little heartburn, the odd burp that will not come up and will not go down. She has had this for years. It comes and goes with worry, with weddings, with festival food. Nothing about her story is alarming. … Read the essay