Pankaj Desai's Blogs

  Out of the blue flashed a tweet on the social medium Tweeter one day: “My dialysis is becoming very draining for me financially.   Oh, how I wish I die”. It stopped at that. One Obgyn doctor read it. She sensed the pain and helplessness of the person who had tweeted. The reader knew nothing about who had put out this stress call. For inexplicable reasons something made her send an immediate personal message “Can I have your mobile number, please”. The person who had tweeted this was a lady in the fourth decade of her life. She was from a town in MP and was diagnosed as a young primary hypertensive for many years. Then this tragedy struck. Theirs was a comfortably resourced family who was buying all treatment for hypertension with ease. But as they say when tragedy strikes, it strikes enmass. Her father a successful businessman faced a massive loss in business. Out of despair he committed a suicide. The shock took away the mother in less than a year. This left her behind ...

  Introduction:             Cesarean section has become the most commonly performed surgery in obstetric practice. When any procedure or technique or for that matter any drug is widely used, it is natural to look at the data to know how rational is our thinking and where has irrationality crept into our thought processes. As students of science, we seek to remain on the scientific course at all times. Therefore evidence becomes very critical for us. Undoubtedly, evidence is provided by data. Hans Rosling in his famous book Factfullness states that when in doubt look at the data. We are going to look at the data for nearly every step that we follow while performing a cesarean section and accordingly conclude. Agreed, it is impossible to cover each and every micro-aspect of the techniques involved in the surgery. However, care has been taken to include all wherein good quality data was available. Nearly all data has been genera...

  We will call him Pravin. Pravin’s father was a farmer. They owned a piece of land in the village, a cow and two buffaloes. His parents’ lives taught him all good values and soft skills. He got his primary schooling in his village. His brilliance was obvious right from his early school days. His father encouraged him to study further. But that was going to be a challenge. The middle and high school was in the town about 5 km away and there was a river between the two villages. Getting admission to that school was not difficult. But commuting in monsoon was going to be a problem. In other months there was a very shallow strip. It was used for walking through the river. But in the monsoon season when the river would be flowing bank to bank, it would mean swimming through. Walking through, Swimming through and sometimes running through      So much was his enthusiasm to study further that walking through, swimming through and sometimes running through didn’t bother h...