Yesterday evening, our apartment security’s wife came to me with her husband’s reports.
Complete blood picture, Widal test for typhoid, malaria test… the whole set.
Her husband had fever for two days and was feeling weak and tired now.
I asked her the history, looked through the reports and everything was absolutely fine. Even the fever had already subsided. At this point, it looked like simple post-viral weakness.
Then she told me why they were worried.
Her husband had apparently gone to one of those quacks whom people here commonly call “RMPs.” He trusts this person so much that apparently he doesn’t believe anyone else.
And this person had told him that he had “severe typhoid.”
His temperature had come down, yes.
But apparently he now had some “inside fever” which was dangerous and needed treatment.
And the treatment?
Three days of injections and infusions.
Not very surprising if you already know how some of these unqualified practitioners work.
So I asked her something very simple.
There is an MD doctor’s clinic literally one street away from our apartment.
Why didn’t you go there?
She said her husband trusts this RMP a lot. And also, the MD doctor might charge around ₹300–500 as consultation fee and they felt it might become costly.
Okay.
So then I asked her how much they had spent here with the quack.
Around ₹50 for consultation.
And almost ₹2,000 already on investigations and injections.
With another two days of injections still remaining.
For what exactly, I don’t know. All in the name of this false typhoid scare.
And apparently, the same thing had happened to one of their relatives who visited the same person a few weeks ago.
The math was not mathing in any sense.
You thought spending ₹300–500 for a consultation with a qualified doctor and getting a valid, trustworthy diagnosis was expensive. So instead, you paid ₹50 as consultation fee to an unqualified person… and ended up spending around ₹3,000 on investigations, injections and medicines that may not have been needed in the first place.
And this is exactly where the problem is. People don’t always calculate the total cost of treatment. They calculate the consultation fee.
₹500 doctor = expensive.
₹50 quack practitioner = affordable.
But what happens after that ₹50 consultation somehow doesn’t enter the calculation.
The bigger problem here is not even just money.
Unnecessary treatment is still treatment entering someone’s body. And a false diagnosis creates fear that didn’t need to exist in the first place.
Of course, affordability and access to healthcare are genuine problems. ₹500 can absolutely be a significant amount for many families.
But spending less at the door doesn’t necessarily mean spending less on healthcare.
Sometimes paying for the right medical opinion first is what actually saves you money, fear and unnecessary treatment later.
And the supposed quack in this particular story might not do this on every single visit but still Iam curious at this point like what about these people brings lot of trust in patients about their diagnosis and treatment without proper qualification.
-Jahnavi Chowdary
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