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For 1 Samjhauta Express there are 10 cross-border conferences: Indian surgeon

* Three Indian surgeons who are in Karachi for a scientific congress talked to Daily Times about bilateral relations, bile duct removal and boring surgeons who never learn new developments

Staff Report

KARACHI: On his first visit to Pakistan for the 23rd annual congress of the Pakistan Society of Gastroenterology and GI Endoscopy, Prof VK Kapoor was pleasantly surprised and a little taken aback when the man operating the lift at the Pearl Continental hotel suddenly pointed at him and exclaimed: “My khala lives in Lucknow!” It took a second for Kapoor to realize that the lift operator had read the conference nametag hanging around his neck which mentioned his name and the city he was from.

For Prof Kapoor and his colleagues from India - Dr Adarsh Chaudhary and Dr Parveen Bhatia from New Delhi - their visit to Karachi for the congress has perhaps reinforced their belief that more cross-border interaction should be encouraged. “For one Samjhauta Express there are at least 10 scientific conferences,” Kapoor told Daily Times, when asked if acts of terrorism had scared them against coming to Pakistan. The problem is that the media, including the media in India, doesn’t highlight that kind of interaction, he added.

Prof Kapoor, who is the head of the department of surgical gastroenterology at the Sanjay Gandhi Post-graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow, said that there needs to be more interaction between all the sciences and not just medicine. “The intellectuals need to take the lead over the politicians,” he said. “We don’t need British or American solutions to our problems. Pakistani solutions can apply to Indian problems and Indian solutions can apply to Pakistani problems because our circumstances are the same.”

Elaborating his point, Kapoor said that in his area of specialty (abdominal tuberculosis), about one-third of the people of the Indian subcontinent have had a tubercular infection. Doctors from the West don’t have as much practice in dealing with tuberculosis as it is not a widespread disease in their part of the world. This is why local doctors should train at home instead of going abroad, Kapoor stressed. The living conditions in the subcontinent, proximity and poverty, for example, mean that TB spreads easily here.

Kapoor said that while a lot of people have been exposed to the TB infection not all develop the disease as our bodies are normally capable of fighting it. It is people with low immunity, such as those with HIV, an alcohol problem or those who are malnourished, who get the disease.

Contrary to what people commonly believe, TB doesn’t just hit the lungs and can involve any organ. The symptoms are pain and vomiting. “What laypeople need to know is that they need to complete their treatment,” Kapoor said. “It is long drawn out, for six months, which is why when people start to feel a little better they give up the medication. However, the infection reoccurs and this time it is resistant to treatment.”

Dr Adarsh Chaudhary of the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, New Delhi, backed Prof Kapoor’s assertion that local doctors should train locally. In fact, he is proud that he went to school in India. Doctors in India work in more volume, he argued, which is why there is better training. Indian surgeons are so good that they are attracting more and more patients from Western countries. The NHS waiting lists are long for surgery in the UK, he said, citing one example of why British patients were coming to India. He has also treated people from Nigeria and Romania.

Dr Chaudhary, who was born in Hoshiarpur, the Punjab, (which according to him is famous for three things: “Chor (thieves), chos (water pools) and Chaudhries”), has been involved in live donor liver transplants. When it was pointed out to him that Pakistan was looking at new cadaver organ transplant laws, he said that this was encouraging. Even in India there is reticence to harvest organs from brain dead people due to cultural and religious beliefs, he said.

Aside from training locally, Dr Parveen Bhatia, laparoscopic surgeon and medical director of the Bhatia Global Hospital and Endosurgery Institute, New Delhi, stressed that doctors from India and Pakistan should follow developments. For example, he said that surgeons learn gall bladder stone removal by laparoscopic or key-hole surgery but then stay stuck at that technique when they should be exploring hernia and uterus removals also. “We treated a one-year old child for a hernia by laparoscopic surgery,” Bhatia said, while giving the example of the development of laparoscopic surgery for children. In fact, India has started using robotics for difficult surgeries. There are four in the country that make inaccessible surgery accessible, such as prostate cancer surgery.

“Pakistani surgeons should come to India and learn there as it is cheaper and much better than going to the UK or the US,” he said, adding that change was also needed. “We curse the darkness but we don’t light a candle. We need to unlearn, learn and then relearn.”

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