The Hindu Business Line : Docs on call!

Controversies and mobile phones go hand in hand. The recent ban clamped by the Government of Karnataka on use of mobile phones by children in schools, has triggered the debate anew. No doubt, school students should be taught to refrain from wasteful use of mobile phones such as listening to music or encouraging callers during classes. Parents are expected to make their children conscious about the perceived risks of excessive use of mobile phones.

Interestingly, in the US and the UK, there has been a strong pressure from the medical and bio-scientific community to allow mobile phone use in hospitals. It is for the docs or patient community to optimise the utility of what is perceived as an essential and handy gadget and avoid unnecessary use of it.

Joseph J. Morrissey, a PhD in biological sciences from the Stanford Medical School, recently in an article in the IEEE journal Spectrum took up cudgels for allowing people to bring mobile phones and other transmitting personal electronic devices such as Blackberries, iPhones, and wireless laptops into hospitals. Three years ago the British Medical Association’s annual conference accepted a similar proposition by Dr Simon Calvert, a specialist registrar at King’s College Hospital in London, who critically observed, “We haven’t moved on in 30 years. Mobile phones seem to be the pariah of the wards, with threats of disciplinary action on any staff using them. What is the evidence behind this draconian approach?” Docs will adequately take care of patients with free use of mobile phones, BMA assured.

On hold

In the developed countries, the ban on use of mobile phones by doctors is about to end. Indian docs and medical scientists do not agree on lifting the ban, although it is not strictly enforced. Dr Santasabuj Das, a cancer researcher who worked for several years in the US and is associated with the National Institute of Communicable and Enteric Diseases, Kolkata, wants the ban to stay. “At the Sanjay Gandhi Institute of Post-graduate Medical Sciences, we were provided with pagers free.

That’s the right thing. I have found that mobile phones benefit docs who thrive on roaring private practice. I found this not only in outpatient departments but in indoor wards too. Patient-party may use mobile phones but outside the ward only,” he says. Doctors employed in government hospitals with lucrative private practice are often seen distracting from patients-under-examination to receive calls from outside. The Indian Medical Association, dominated by private practitioners, has a liberal stance. Dr Subhas Chakraborty, formerly honorary joint general secretary and a senior official of ESI health system in West Bengal, considers mobile phones beneficial for both docs and patients.

“A surgeon needs to speak beforehand to his assistants and operation-theatre nurse on preparation of OT. Relatives of a critical patient can call the doc who is allowed to do private medical practice even when the doc is on duty at a hospital. The mobile phone does a social service, you should appreciate,” he says candidly.

I realised how essential a mobile phone could be while hospitalised with a massive pleural effusion in my left lung. Often, docs drew blood samples at short notice outside visiting hours and suggested that the same be analysed at ‘reliable’ private diagnostic laboratories. But for the mobile phone — a zigri dost — I couldn’t ensure those tests samples reached the labs in time for pathological tests.

Health risks?

Mobile phones are a friend if judiciously used. The assumption that mobile phone-use exposes juveniles and teenagers to the possibility of loss of memory and hearing remains a hypothesis. Whether it is a threat is to be statistically examined through a proper sample survey.

The Ecolog Institute of Germany, based on a 15-year study among mobile-phone users, negates the presumption that radiation from mobile-phone transmitter masts may cause brain cancer. Even the possibility of brain tumour is hypothetical. The Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority of Finland conducted a study, scanning 1,521 glioma (tumour in glial cells in the central nervous system) patients against 3,300 healthy mobile-phone users in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and England for over a year. This too found no linkage. The project, funded by the World Health Organisation, inferred that glioma is not due to radiation from mobile phones.

An outright ban on mobile phones for schoolchildren is not backed by strong clinical logic. On the contrary, it is tantamount to abrogation of human rights, let alone denial of their use in emergency. Misuse and excessive use — too much of everything being bad — are another issue..

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