By Daniel Kanu
Assistant Political Editor
U.S.- based medical practitioner, Dr Anuma Ulu, has said that the time has come for medical and paramedical specialists in Nigeria to drop certain unacceptable standards in the medical field to abreast evident facts.
Anuma, a Nigerian, who has a Fellowship in Geriatric Medicine and have worked chiefly in the Emergency room (called the Casualty Department in Nigeria) in several hospitals in the US, observed that the nation’s medical sector needs more training to reduce the harm witnessed in that section.
To that effect he has promised to keep a column in some nation’s print and on-line newspapers.
“The column aims at achieving medical education, which is simply to teach the general population about common approaches to medical problems that are currently applied erroneously so as to reduce harm occasioned by offering such helps wrongly.
“It may perhaps involve one to also juggle the sensibilities of my medical and paramedical colleagues who either by omission, commission, peer pressure, mass action or abject disregard for the decorous and the standardized, have gone astray and have been causing harm or at best no benefits”.
Anuma, who graduated from the University of Nigeria Medical School in 1994 before proceeding to work as medical doctor in Trinidad, Australia and the US, observed for instance, the wrong technique faint victims go through during their dejected experience.
Anuma’s words: “Generally people faint because there is decreased oxygen, nutrient and blood supply to the brain which requires a higher hydrostatic pressure to perfuse when the person is standing erect, akin to people who live upstairs in a building having less flow of their pipe-borne water than those living on floors below them.
“Since it takes only three minutes of lack of oxygen to the brain for it to be irrevocably damaged and the person becomes a vegetable, nature made it for you to faint when this oxygen is in short supply, so that your heart (the pump) and your brain will be at the same hydrostatic level so that blood and oxygen, even if the person is hypotensive, can flow passively to the brain to supply the needed oxygen to the brain.
“Going by above, Nigerians do untold damage to people who are propped up from falling after fainting because we could be depriving the brain of the needed oxygen if the shortage lasts longer than three minutes.
“What we need to do is catch the person from falling hard to avoid injuries from the fall but quickly and gently lower the person to a safe ground.
“Even the practice of pouring water is useless and could even drown the person if the face is not spared. The only beneficial thing will be very cold water on the rest of the body sparing the face, to induce vasoconstriction and increased peripheral vascular resistance, in case of causative orthostasis.
“Crowding around the person showing compassion is counterproductive as the mob may deprive the patient of the atmospheric oxygen needed. Only people actively doing medical maneuvers should be surrounding the patient”.
Anuma, who is also an expert on Family Practice said that there was the need for great medical awareness in the country to challenge certain practices that were not based on scientific proofs.
“There is Google now as well as other search engines, and lay people can have passable idea of what afflicts them before even going to the doctor, and this happens in the USA and other climes.
“This is divorced from most medical practices in Nigeria where grandfatherism, being a system where the medical doctor is all-knowing and dishes out what is best for the patient who is too uninformed to ask questions, and such directives are often couched in mystery as in scraping off names of medications before dispensing, is routine” he noted.
Ulu embarks on free medical missions in Nigeria at least twice yearly, usually self-sponsored.