“Now the patients have become over smart \u2014 questioning, doubting, and challenging almost everything you do for them.” Sudhakar Sawdatkar says this without bitterness. He then immediately adds what makes the observation worth making: “And yet, I feel very satisfied with my practice.” He sees close to 100 patients over a 12-hour period that starts at 8 a.m. The contradiction between the first sentence and the second is not a contradiction at all. It is a description of what good medical practice looks like at the end of four decades: demanding, changed, and still rewarding enough to justify getting up early.<\/p>\n\n\n
Sudhakar was born in Washim to a farmer \u2014 a background he shares with a significant fraction of his GMC 1973 batch, who came overwhelmingly from the agricultural districts of Vidarbha. He went to school in Pangarkhed, in the Mehkar tehsil of Washim district, then moved to Washim for middle and high school at a government high school. Pre-medical college education followed at Vidarbha Mahavidyalaya, Amravati.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At GMC Nagpur, he was Roll Number 169, Batch D. In the first year, he shared a room with Ramesh Mundle at Aruna Lodge in Dhantoli \u2014 an arrangement that would establish a friendship between two men who would both go on to careers in Medicine, on paths that diverged sharply and then converged again through the GMC 1973 alumni network. In 1975, both moved into GMC hostel. “In Hostel 3,” Sudhakar recalls, “I had my room in the same wing as Kapgate, Mundle, Biyani, and Somvanshi.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduation, he interned at Wadner Primary Health Center \u2014 70 km southwest of Nagpur in Wardha district \u2014 alongside Shyam Bawage, Mahendra Sawarkar, Balkrishna Tayade, and Padmakar Somvanshi. His urban internship was at Civil Hospital, Buldhana.<\/p>\n\n\n
Sudhakar’s postgraduate journey was not the straight line of those who entered MD programs immediately after internship. He served first as a Medical Officer at the primary health center, Wadner \u2014 in Malkapur taluka, Buldhana district \u2014 from 1979 to 1986. Seven years at a PHC is a long time. It builds a particular kind of clinical competence: broad, pragmatic, attuned to the resources available rather than the resources ideal. It also tests character. Sudhakar survived the test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1987, he went to GMC Nagpur for the Diploma in Tuberculosis and Chest Diseases. This was followed, between 1989 and 1992, by MD (Medicine) at BJ Government Medical College, Pune \u2014 as an in-service candidate, a significant logistical and personal achievement for a man already in his mid-thirties. His MD thesis examined the clinical profile of splenomegaly; the work was supervised by Dr. Sirsikar. He earned his MD in 1992 \u2014 fourteen years after his MBBS, and at an age when most of his contemporaries had been in private practice for a decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Until 2000 he served as a Class I specialist at Buldhana, then resigned from government service and started his 15-bed private hospital. “I see close to 100 patients over a 12-hour period that starts at 8 a.m.,” he says. The number is large; the hours are long. He has been doing this for more than two decades.<\/p>\n\n\n
Sudhakar has watched the doctor-patient relationship transform across his career with the attentiveness of someone who has been on the receiving end of both its better and worse versions. “Now patients question, doubt, and challenge almost everything,” he says. “Earlier, the doctor was the authority. Now the patient comes with a printout from the internet.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He does not say this to lament the older arrangement \u2014 the arrangement in which patients were passive and doctors omnipotent was not, by most measures, better for patients. What he is registering is a shift in the social contract of medicine, one that requires more explanation, more patience, and more comfort with uncertainty from the physician’s side. These are skills he has. They are skills built over forty years at PHCs and hospitals and finally in his own clinic on the bus-stand road in Buldhana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His son Sujit received the HS Wadia Gold Medal in Cardiology for standing first in the country in the DNB (Cardiology) examination in December 2013 \u2014 a achievement that Sudhakar mentions with the restraint of a man who does not boast but cannot entirely suppress his pride. Sujit trained at Ruby Hall Clinic, Pune, and now practices at Noble Hospital, Hadapsar. Madhuri, Sudhakar’s daughter, is an MBBS graduate from Government Medical College, Aurangabad, with a diploma in Dermatology; she practices in Nagpur. The Sawdatkar family has produced three doctors across two generations. The third \u2014 the one who started the line \u2014 still shows up at 8 a.m. every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jaishree, his wife, is a homemaker who managed the household through the years of PHC postings, the in-service MD candidacy, and the eventual settling in Buldhana. Nana, the nickname his parents gave him \u2014 he was the eldest \u2014 has stuck through all of it. He became a grandfather for the first time in June 2014, when Madhuri’s daughter arrived. He became Nana again, in the literal sense, at the moment he had always been Nana in the family sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"