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Case Of Doctors In Country Of Morale Offices

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Case Of Doctors In Country Of Morale Offices
IRYNA KHALIP

The ice will melt and the major will find himself in a puddle.

The website of the state employment service has 5,200 vacancies for doctors. A fortnight ago there were 3,500. Minus a thousand seven hundred in a fortnight? If I were them, I'd also run away - if not from the country, then from medicine. To any other place - pharmaceuticals, fitness, McDonald's. That's because being "the ice under the major's feet" is life-threatening.

The doctor's fault is that he is a specialist. Educated, highly skilled, dealing with the latest technology. "A modern doctor is far cooler than any IT person, even Bill Gates," Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov has said to me recently. And it's true. Artificial joints, implants, bionic lenses, exoskeletons, 3D-printed internal organs - we, mere mortals, will never understand what kind of animals they are and how to treat them. But the doctors - they treat, tame these bizarre beasts, save and prolong our lives. The doctor of the twenty-first century is almost a celestial, merely by virtue of his knowledge and qualifications.

In the civilised world, where professionalism is respected, doctors are treated accordingly. In our country, in the land of majors-morale offices, the opposite is true. The doctor is supposed to be angry, tortured by his two-time job plus night duty, and poor. And patients should fear this doctor, hate him, and present him with cognac. Then there would be harmony, like it was during the stagnation, dear to the morale offices' heart. And for a doctor not to feel like a man, he must be immersed in conditions as close to that stagnation as possible: to send him, for example, to work in a district hospital where there is no ventilator, or ultrasound, or MRI, where the entire arsenal of medicine is represented by a pair of tweezers and a pipette, where the patients die simply because they cannot be examined. And if a doctor manages to find a job that involves the use of modern technology, and moreover, with imported components, he must be imprisoned. And preferably - by entire industries.

First, cardiologists were jailed for heart valves. Then there were doctors-managers who signed contracts on the purchase of medicines, equipment and machinery. Now traumatologists are in jail, for recommending ideologically harmful joint prostheses. They say in medical circles that the next victims will be ophthalmologists - for artificial lenses. As for trauma surgeons, officials speak of 35 arrested specialists. However, the actual number of repressed is higher. Just not all of them were jailed. But those, who were dragged for interrogations and threatened, are almost 90. Considering that there are slightly more than 300 traumatologists in our country. One can imagine how many people were left without the necessary surgeries at that time. On the other hand, the majors have once again felt the ice under their feet.

They, majors of all ranks and titles, were telling the Belarusians horror stories about the money that had been found during searches of the doctors. At that, nobody was able to explain clearly what the damage to the state was. If these doctors crossed the border illegally at night in filthy, once white lab coats, bought undocumented endoprostheses somewhere near Krakow or Leipzig and smuggled them illegally, past the customs, into the country - that would be understandable. If they were stealing state-owned alcohol from work - it is also understandable, people would have no questions. However, people have had no questions for a long time now. It's a rare national unity: everybody understands everything and no horror stories can make a Belarusian believe that the orthopaedist-traumatologist, who has offered the patient a good German prosthesis, for which he must pay in cash and not in an envelope under the table, is a criminal and a swindler. Belarusians do not believe in fairy tales, and neither do their authors.

Certainly, the first thing that comes to mind is the simple greed of the authorities. If a doctor or a representative of any other profession has started to earn money - it must be confiscated immediately. And it is always easier to do this in an organised way, because the scale of "group of persons" implies much larger amounts of payoffs. And here, of course, you can't go wrong: doctors, bankers, bus controllers - everyone goes to jail. And yet, the repressive campaigns against the medical profession are carried out with surprising regularity. The government is not only envious of their professionalism, education, and free-thinking, but is trying to gobble them up with gnawing and snorting. The authorities cannot forgive them for being dependent on them themselves - simply physically.

After almost thirty years, the morale offices are getting decrepit. Their old chronic diseases are worsening and new ones are appearing. And it turns out that the health, and indeed the life of each of them, is in the hands of these very "bargains". You can put half the country in prison, but if you can't get out of bed without a doctor, it means that he is stronger than you and all your sycophants. That's why the authorities hate doctors. That's why they retaliate by imprisoning them by the dozens. That's why they send surgeon Andrei Lyubetski to prison for five years. That's why they are devouring the best. And they keep trying to convince doctors that they are the ice under the major's feet.

However, spring has already arrived. The ice is melting and the major will soon find himself in a puddle.

Iryna Khalip, specially for Charter97.org

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