What's Ailing Grandpa Surisvatay?

With mounting frustration, I'm watching an attempt to secure adequate health care for an elderly relative turn into something that looks a lot like a failed foreign aid project.

My friend's grandpa lives in the old country, let's say Malaysia. The heptagenarian is getting doddery and forgetful, so the family brought him to Sweden for a month of medical checkup at a pretty stiff cost in air tickets, hospital bills and inconvenience for all involved. The Swedish doctors put him through an array of tests, some of them quite expensive, one involving the procurement of short-lived radioactive isotopes from a reactor facility in the Netherlands.

Now they know exactly what degenerative geriatric condition Mr Surisvatay suffers from. They can't reverse the damage to Gramps's brain, but they can relieve the symptoms, and they can slow down the continued deterioration. So they equipped the family with a detailed regimen of medication and all the necessary prescriptions for meds.

Thus fortified, Grandpa Surisvatay goes home to Kuala Lumpur and is welcomed into the bosom of his family. Who immediately get all his medication disastrously wrong. The dosage documentation somehow becomes lost. They feel that half a pill a day to start with can't be enough. "They're so small, it's ridiculous! Let's give him one and a half for good measure!" So instead of easing Gramps onto the meds according to plan, they jump-start the procedure, and the old man is unable to sleep for 72 hours.

Slightly taken aback that a larger dose of the meds doesn't lead to a more rapid improvement, the family takes Gramps to a respected local specialist. He's not a traditional witch doctor and snake oil salesman: this guy's training is actually in evidence-based medicine. The family offer this forbidding presence documentation by the Swedish physicians, but somehow he isn't interested. He certainly doesn't need to perform a month of tests: it takes him half an hour's conversation to decide what the patient needs. And this doctor's way of making sure the patient does what he's told is to threaten him with dire consequences. "Do what I say, or else!" This impresses the family no end, and the old man is so scared he starts shaking worse than ever.

So it seems the whole trip to the West, inflicted on an old man in the early stages of dementia, all the work by the physicians, all the tests, all the days off from work taken by the Swedish relatives, were just wasted. It's exactly like those abortive attempts to establish modern industry and health-care programs in Third World countries. The ones where there's nobody outside the foreign aid agency who has had enough schooling, or is free enough from clan loyalties, to keep anything above the level of a bus service running for the greater good of society.

This combination of inefficiency, obtuseness and lack of consideration for the weak just drives me crazy. I realise that there are very few countries in this world where I could live and not have a premature heart attack from sheer frustration.

[More blog entries about health, medicine, elderly; hälsa, äldrevård, sjukvård.]