MISCEPY

The doctors are sick - Danton Remoto

REMOTE CONTROL By DANTON REMOTO

Last New Years Eve, Jan-Jan , a 39-year-old gay man in Cebu City, was going home after a drunken revelry. On the streets he met a male sex worker, whom he brought home. The next day, when he woke up, there was pain inside his rectum, and the sex worker was gone.
He asked his sister to bring him to the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center, a government-run hospital. The doctor examined him, sneered, and told him he needed surgery for a perfume canister embedded in his rectum. He was made to quickly sign papers he was not given the chance to read. He was sedated before the operation, and he did not know that while the perfume canister was being extracted from him, the doctors and the nurses and a whole menagerie of medical practitioners were recording everything with their cell phone cameras.
Anti-gay jokes – which the educated set in the operating room thought were witty – were exchanged. It was a scene enough for Hippocrates to turn in his ancient grave.
Some malignant soul uploaded the two-minute-plus long vide on YouTube, and thus began the public humiliation of Jan Jan – not once, not twice, but many times over, as the images were downloaded, passed from cell phone to cell phone, the images replicated to the nth degree via technology.
Said Jan Jan: "I trusted them. And yet they ridiculed me. . . Was that something that professionals should do? Now I cant even walk the streets without being laughed at by my neighbors. I want my ordeal to end. And I hope it doesnt happen to anyone else."
Confidentiality
The arrow of his words hit the bulls eye of the issue: confidentiality and trust. What the bright doctors and nurses at the Cebu hospital did was a violation of the patient-doctor confidentiality that is part of the Code of Ethics of a medical practitioner.
What rubs salt on the patients injury was the fact that the doctors and nurses were shown laughing – with the glee reserved only for the insanely happy – while the patient was sedated, helpless, and tied to the bedposts like a pig.
Why was the victim not made to read the papers he signed? Why was there a horde of kibitzers inside the operating room? Was a medical operation really going on, or were they watching a specimen under the merciless lens of a microscope, or an animal in a zoo?
Counseling
There seems to be a pattern of deception here. A patients written permission is needed before any recording can be made of an operation. And this recording could be done only if the case will advance the cause of medicine or science.
The officials of the hospital just released a statement saying that they will slap administrative charges against three doctors and a nurse in connection with the case, for allowing a videotape to take place.
We in Ang Ladlad – the national organization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Filipinos – are offering psychological counseling and legal services to Jan Jan. We will also make sure the case will not die, will prosper in the courts, and will reach the Professional Regulations Commission and the Civil Service Commission.
There was a time when doctors were called "The Men Who Play God." That is even the title of a collection of stories by the Filipino doctor and writer, Arturo Rotor. But in this case, the doctors were not gods or goddesses. And the one who was sick was not the patient.
The doctors were the ones who were sick.
Comments can be sent to dantn_ph@yahoo.com or www.angladlad.org