Three Indian doctors caught on camera apparently agreeing to amputate the healthy limbs of beggars are to be questioned by the Indian Medical Council, an official said Tuesday.
Secretly filmed footage taken by the CNN-IBN news channel and broadcast Saturday showed one of the doctors asking for 10,000 rupees (about $215) to amputate a lower leg, leaving a stump that may draw sympathy — and a few rupees — from passersby.
He then suggests chopping off three fingers from the man’s left hand.
“Believe me if there are two beggars in front of you and one of them is lame, you will give the money to the lame beggar,” the station recorded him as saying in Hindi.
I suppose this qualifies as cosmetic surgery — given the patient’s profession.
This sounds unusual, but it isn’t. I know a surgeon that does charity work in 3rd world countries and it sickens him that people will break their little children’s legs (the femur) so they can get more money begging. He works with the local priest to get these children and repair their legs. It is sickening.
I guess there isn’t much work for Java programmers anymore.
Read “A Fine Balance” by Rohinton Mistry. An amazing book.
Americans shouldn’t be surprised to read of this kind of barbarism in third world countries or by mafias here. We tolerate the same criminal behavior at the corporate level in this country. I know of an unscrupulous medical center in Loma Linda, California, where major industrial polluters can buy Nazi medical ethics. The story is that Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors were facing a multi-billion dollar expense in cleaning up the ground water that they polluted with the toxin perchlorate. So the polluters hire Loma Linda University Medical Center to find volunteers willing to ingest a daily dose of the known thyroid damaging toxin perchlorate for six months. I suppose it’s much cheaper to buy unethical research and to try to prove that known toxins aren’t as deadly as previously thought than to have to actually spend billions to clean up all the ground water that has high concentrations of perchlorate in the west and southwest U.S.
http://thyroid.about.com/cs/toxicchemicalsan/a/perchlorate.htm
http://www.ewg.org/reports/perchlorate/pr.html
you should read “holy cow” by … i forget. my brother is borrowing the book, but it’s really good and has a lot of examples of what goes on with the poor in india.
there is an incident where the author sees a homeless man get run over by a bus. a guy in small car drives up to the man, gets out of his car, pulls the still living man to the curb, gets in his car and drives off again … as if the homeless man is a branch, not a living thing.
crazy.
Doctors do that sort of thing here all the time. The city of San Francisco will even pay for it for government workers. Somehow calling it a sex change operation makes it all OK.
How come he’s not wearing a TWIT hat John?