I'd like to know what western doctors have to say about Ahmed's case (also see the next post). I saw Ahmed and his mother yesturday. Admittedly, they are poor, uneducated people without alot of coping skills ... Um Ahmed flies off the handle quickly and she says some pretty, shall we say, colorful things. Having a son with MS and no money to deal with the problem means that she's usually pretty angry when she's dealing with the doctors.
When I saw them, both she and her son said that they were treated very callously when they went to the hospital. The panel review that Dr. M spoke of ended up as follows: they handed Um Ahmed her son's file and told her to go find each of the doctors on the panel to get their signature. She ran all over the hospital looking for doctors and only found two on the list. One wasn't even at that hospital but was in another hospital in Khadamiyia. She hasn't the money to be running around in taxi's dealing with this. She was reduced to going from person to person asking, "Are you Dr. So and So?"
One doctor took the documents and handed them back to her without comment. When she went onto the next person, this 2nd person indicated that the man she was looking for had been the one she had just shown the document too!
It was only after she had a trantrum outside of one doctor's office that he even agreed to see Ahmed ... briefly. He made Ahmed try to walk across the room (which unfortunately he couldn't) and that was the extent of his "review of the case."
Essentially Um Ahmed is poor, she's uneducated, she's powerless and these doctors are reaming her because they can (and also probably because in her anger, she becomes quarrelsome). Most likely there just aren't enough drugs and they don't plan wasting the drugs they have on someone like Ahmed. When you see situations like this you start to understand the deep level of resentment and frustration that people have when they see that nothing seems to be improving.
By the way, this is a woman, who (upon my handing her a fact sheet on MS written in Arabic ... she can read but Ahmed can't) denied that this could be the problem that he has. She believe that he needs one shot and that will make him better. The doctors have not even bothered to properly explain this disease to her (though honestly, she is sooooo superstitious that it would be difficult).
When I saw them, both she and her son said that they were treated very callously when they went to the hospital. The panel review that Dr. M spoke of ended up as follows: they handed Um Ahmed her son's file and told her to go find each of the doctors on the panel to get their signature. She ran all over the hospital looking for doctors and only found two on the list. One wasn't even at that hospital but was in another hospital in Khadamiyia. She hasn't the money to be running around in taxi's dealing with this. She was reduced to going from person to person asking, "Are you Dr. So and So?"
One doctor took the documents and handed them back to her without comment. When she went onto the next person, this 2nd person indicated that the man she was looking for had been the one she had just shown the document too!
It was only after she had a trantrum outside of one doctor's office that he even agreed to see Ahmed ... briefly. He made Ahmed try to walk across the room (which unfortunately he couldn't) and that was the extent of his "review of the case."
Essentially Um Ahmed is poor, she's uneducated, she's powerless and these doctors are reaming her because they can (and also probably because in her anger, she becomes quarrelsome). Most likely there just aren't enough drugs and they don't plan wasting the drugs they have on someone like Ahmed. When you see situations like this you start to understand the deep level of resentment and frustration that people have when they see that nothing seems to be improving.
By the way, this is a woman, who (upon my handing her a fact sheet on MS written in Arabic ... she can read but Ahmed can't) denied that this could be the problem that he has. She believe that he needs one shot and that will make him better. The doctors have not even bothered to properly explain this disease to her (though honestly, she is sooooo superstitious that it would be difficult).
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