Fatal Margin: A doctor’s dilemma

Dr Umanath Nayak, head and neck cancer surgeon at the city’s Apollo Hospital, is convinced about his career as a writer now. After publishing a “technical textbook” in 2009, Voice Restoration After Total Laryngectomy, he released his first novel, Fatal Margin, recently. His next is a light-hearted take on how to understand wives and women, in general, better. Humour is his forte.  
 
Medical drama
The novel is about a talented oncologist, Dr Veer Ragahvan, who goes easy on medical ethics to make money. Suspected of fraud and medical negligence, he is dragged to court, and the drama unfolds over the last 80 pages in the book. Unlike his wife Seema and 18-year-old son Jatin, who can devour any genre, Dr Nayak is a John Grisham fan and loves courtroom dramas.

The plot of his book raises uncomfortable topics like nexus between pharmaceutical companies and hospitals, lure of kickbacks and corporatisation of hospitals.
While Dr Nayak maintains it’s purely a work of fiction, he doesn’t dismiss the fact that he had to “cloak the facts a bit.

The nexus
“It starts subtly with pharmaceutical companies sponsoring medical conferences for a doctor. Then doctors who get greedier ask the firms to pay for family trips. The firms  then start expecting some returns and ask doctors to write expensive drugs for the patients,” he says adding, “It was practised blatantly a few years ago but now the Medical Council of India has cracked the whip.”
 
Moral dilemma
The prime reason of writing Fatal Margin was to debate medical ethics. What happens when a young doctor is posted in a big, private hospital, where a lot of money is flowing between the corporate houses and management? He says, “In corporate-backed hospitals, temptation is more. And naturally, young doctors face moral dilemmas. A doctor can think ‘I’m bringing patients and hence, business to the hospital, then why should I miss out on the piece of cake? One needs to develop strong ethical principles in order not to be lured by these thoughts.”