On a recent morning I awoke in a nation that promised to provide me with total health care insurance and threw in loans for education. Actually both were more of a government mandate. It had been some time since I woke in such a totalitarian approach to daily life and could not help but remembering the last time I lived in such a nation.
We were on a medical exchange mission to the Peoples Republic of China and traveling, mostly with military transports, to the various four corners of China – Shanghai, Beijing, Xian with the Terra Cotta Warriors, and Guilin near the Li River and with Hong Kong as our final destination.
The usual exchange would be a group demonstration of the show-case hospitals in the great cities and then we would break off into smaller groups with the different medical specialties. The hospitals were all state owned and controlled and were rather small compared to the luxury hotels being built for the tourist trade. Hospital care was divided into traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine. At the time the main academic hospital was in Beijing. Ironically the Rockefeller Institute had built it in the 1920’s.
In Shanghai, the largest hospital we visited, we were escorted to the various patient rooms. One room would have a patient with maxibustion wicks smoldering from acupuncture needles positioned in various parts of the patients body. In the room next door was a new CT scan that was in the process of being repaired, we were told. In the surgical amphitheater abdominal surgery, using hypnosis as anesthetic was preformed for our benefit.
All patients could opt for either “Traditional Chinese Medicine” (based on alternative medicine, herbs and some common medicines) or “Western Medicine” with only a very few of the advances in medicine and surgery found mostly in America, and Europe. We were told there was no charge for the Traditional Medical care but the “Western” medical care was out of pocket.
The nursing care was for the most part a duty of the patient’s family who came and lived and frequently cooked in the room with the patient. Actually most medical care outside the large cities in China was practiced by the famous “Bare Foot Doctors” from the Mao years. This care was outside of a hospital. They were very much the prototype for the Cuban “political doctors” working today in many parts of South America.
The Chinese physicians and medical personal were very personable and we could exchange a good deal of thought and medical science in English. The politics were left out of the conversation as it was too soon after Mao.
One young woman physician, an eye specialist, was very interested in learning the implant cataract surgery so exciting at the time. There was no possibility of the government allowing cataract surgery for anyone but the elite of the party so she asked if I could get her the implants and technical manuals from “free America.”
I understood that she meant by “free” both as a gift for her patients and the freedom of our American health care system. Thanks to the American implant companies I was able to send a supply of lens and manuals for the surgery. We corresponded over several years on technique and medicine in general.
One day, years later, I received a letter (with no return address) telling me she was now a Surgical Resident in an American hospital. She did not want to be contacted but wanted me to know she was thankful for introducing her to American medicine and the freedom to practice the art and science of Medicine. Now she could practice as a free individual helping other free individuals.
It was the common sense of the Judeo-Christian roots of Western Medicine that made the individual person’s life valuable beyond a government mandated price. She understood the ideal of a free physician-patient relationship and it had made the young physician risk escaping to our nation. She wanted to be part of the world’s greatest medical care that ever existed. This morning I wonder what that Chinese physician thinks of Obamacare and American medical care heading more towards the Mao- Marxist model of the “free” and total medical care she left in China.
Maybe Marx was right. The history of man is a “dialectic progress” and we must return to the past and reform medical care with the Government in control of the basic things like Traditional Medicine for the masses and Western Medicine for the elite only. It is another life and death decision the individual does not get to make. But it will be “free and almost equal”.
Don Chisholm, M.D., lives in Dillon. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
