Managing COVID 19 through timelines by Dr. Mathew Varghese

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv9jDIKKUBg

Even now – sixteen months into the COVID-19 Pandemic in India – this video should be compulsory viewing for:

 

1.      Ministers in the Union Cabinet including the PM

2.      ICMR Director General

3.      AIIMS Director

4.      Corporate Press

5.   Section of the bureaucracy dealing with matters of health and home affairs

 

There should be no hesitation if the PMO invites over Dr. Mathew Varghese and puts any relevant questions which could have a bearing on treatment and financial resources, nay a fundamental quantum shift in the treatment policy.

 

Personally the undersigned stands humbled; after having written eighteen articles in Countercurrents.org in 2020 (individually and co-authored with Shobha Aggarwal), I had erroneously thought that it was pneumonia in the lungs. Now Dr. Mathew Varghese has clarified that it is blood clots in the lungs.

 

I have had the privilege of working with Mathew Varghese in 1980 at LNJPN hospital and later as part of the ABVA Collective. He is wedded and welded to his professional work with a missionary zeal often using a chunk of his pay for the welfare of the poor.

 

Why Dr. Mathew Varghese reminds me of Hugh Owen Thomas

 

Dr. Mathew Varghese has been involved in slum work right since the 1980s (apart from work in government/private hospitals). Presently at the polio ward, St. Stephen’s hospital, New Delhi – his very own brain child – one could see him examining patients with “a hammer in his hands to check the limb reflexes, a tape to measure the length of hands and legs and a goniometer to ensure precise measurement of angles…”; Thomas in his times carried a wrench in his apron pocket to fix the fractures!

 

Hugh Owen Thomas was a general practitioner in the slums of Liverpool most of his professional life, treating the poor rather than the affluent Victorian middle classes. He concerned himself primarily with orthopaedic surgery, and is considered the founder of orthopedic surgery in Britain.

 

His practice was so busy that he started his rounds at five or six in the morning and never left his home for other than professional purposes. The only exception to this were the three times a year when he visited his mother's grave.

 

Thomas would designate Sunday as his "free day", when hundreds of patients from all over the countryside besieged Nelson Street in the morning, filling the house to overflowing and the surrounding streets with carriages and invalid chairs.

(Extracted from: https://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/2947.html)

 

P. S. Sahni

 

(Why I have dropped prefix Dr. from my name see http://aidsbhedbhavvirodhiandolan.blogspot.com/2021/05/covid-19-pandemic-india-need-citizens.html)