Trick or Treat - a survival guide to health care
28 Revenge is double-edged The Farmer and the Fox: A farmer was troubled by a fox that kept stealing his
fowls at night. He set a trap and caught the fox. As a punishment, he tied a bunch
of tow to its tail and set it on fire. The fox ran helter-skelter through the ripe cornfield. The field was soon on fire and the farmer lost his harvest.
A community of a consumerist society was greatly annoyed by the health care
providers who, they felt, were exploiting the ill and vulnerable to accumulate wealth.
Once, in a case of negligence in obstetrics (midwifery), the jury felt it justifiable to slap a
stiff penalty on the erring doctor and send a clear message to all the doctors. The penalty
was so stiff that the insurance premium for obstetric negligence skyrocketed. Most of the
obstetricians migrated to neighbouring states rather than pay such high premiums for insurance cover. The end result was that the community had to travel 100 to 200 Kms to a neighbouring state for delivery under proper obstetric care. Comments Prof S Chandrasekar, my guru, used to tell us, "There are no guarantees in Medicine. For us, 'Always' means most of the time and 'Never' means hardly ever.� This
reality has to be understood by the professionals and accepted by the society. Under the present tort system of redressal, the 'victim' has to prove that the care provider was
negligent. The system promotes 'ambulance chasing lawyers' who specialise in finding
faults in the health care services to get compensation awarded to the client. Doctor-
patient trust gets ruined in the process (see Chapter 19 for a discussion on 85
