Today, Sevagram Cyclonesโa bunch of bicycle aficionadosโmotivated each other to set mobile alarms at 4:45 am to get up early on a Sunday morning. The plan was to take a two-way 60 km bike rideโfrom Sevagram to Bor Dam. So, Sumedh Manikpure (a medical student), Hardik More (an intern), Nikita Bhugra (a resident), Ashwini Kalantri …
Meeting Dr Desikan
Dr. KV Desikan. Ninety-one-year-old man. This morning, I spent an hour and a half with himโforgetting our age differencesโand spoke to him on a variety of topicsโhis tryst with Sevagram, his leprosy work, his medical maladies and how he copes with them, and the modern doctors. With organisational and administrative skills and energy as enormous …
Dr Varun Bhargava and Babulal
Varun Bhargava (VB) came to Sevagram in 1969. He belonged to the first batch of MGIMS. Four years later, he graduated from MGIMS, went to PGI, Chandigarh to earn his MD (Medicine) and established a highly successful practice in Nagpur. His 100-bed hospitalโdriven by ethics and scienceโ evokes a level of respect and admiration that …
Medical Errors
Four hundred thousand patients in the hospitals in the United States die every year because of medical errorsโfrom mistakes that could have been prevented. The BMJ article, published three days ago, says that โif the medical error was a disease, it would rank as the third leading cause of death in the US.โ Preventable medical …
Super specialists
When I began practising Medicine at MGIMS, whenever I ran into a medical problem, which I thought I could not solve, I would seek a super specialistโs help. This indeed made sense. After all, their years of training and rich experience would help me order the best test, choose the drug that works or pick …
Mammograms: Overdiagnosis
Did I stir up a hornetโs nest when I tried to examine the benefits and harms of mammography? Iโm glad I did. I might have been less than generous in my remarks about mammography, but that does not diminish my unqualified admiration of those who believe that it works. I am happy that some of …
Screening for breast Cancer
Recently, I was part of a team that was caring for a woman with breast cancer. โWould I have fared better had I undergone mammography when I turned 50?โ, she asked me. She is right because a neighbouring medical school is offering mammography on wheelsโbringing technology to the doorsteps of rural women who cannot access …
Vive La Difference!
Worldwide, women have shaped medical education, healthcare, and research. They now make up half of all medical schoolsโ at MGIMS, in a dozen batches (86, 87, 90-94, 98-99, 2001, 2011 and 2014) girls outnumbered boys. They have led the institute, the department, and the units. They have also published papers that have changed the face …
What should Siddhartha Mukherjee do to earn a promotion?
I chanced to read Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjeeโs profile on Simon and Schuster website this evening. โSiddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher. He is the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia …
Mrs Behere
Mrs Mani Behereโpassed away today evening at her home in Sevagram. For over a decade, she had worked in our department of Psychiatry as a faculty. A kind-hearted womanโalways sporting a genuine smile on her face, and exuding warmth and loveโshe fought a long battle with metastatic breast cancer and endured her illness with fortitude. …