I overheard this conversation in my local grocery shop:

"Did you hear about Chika? She died, a heart attack, only 16 years old. She'd seen her doctor only the week before, but he didn't send her for tests or anything".

Then a conversation followed about neglectful, overpaid, inattentive Nigerian doctors who can't even be sued because they all lie to protect each other.

Everyone had a story; the diabetic mother whose child was stillborn, the neighbour whose cancer was undetected until it was too late, the undetected appendicitis which could have killed the patient.

The assumption of guilt according to local gossip is ever present, for hasn't everyone got a story, known an arrogant doctor?

As a doctor, I've gained a different perspective. I've seen how long doctors work, how exhausted, how concerned, how frustrated.

I've had conversations about hard it is to detect some cases that, by chance, we had the intuition to investigate further.

Medicine is a mixture of science and art, much more than people imagine. Resources are limited, many things cannot be tested for, or predicted.

Patients sometimes expect miracles from medicine without doing their part (changing diet/exercise habits, stopping smoking etc)

I've seen first hand how hard some things are to diagnose, even with the vested interest of the doctor. How hard, or impossible some things are to cure

In Nigeria, doctors are paid crumbs.

And the 16 year old who died? She'd had no symptoms in a thorough check up.

Some deaths are sudden. Unpredictable.

Shocking to the family but also the doctor.

Yet increasingly there is a climate of fear from which a growing army of lawyers and journalists profit.

Trust in doctors is being eroded, and there is increasing pressure on the medical profession to do the impossible.

I mean doctors know a lot but they certainly do not know everything.

With the proliferation of internet, I think patients have higher and higher levels of expectation for their doctors to know everything and if the doctors do not know everything, the patients get disappointed.

However, it is the doctors who say, “I don’t know,” those are the good ones. The doctors who pretend that they know everything, those are the dangerous ones.

At the end of the day, we have been experiencing an explosion of medical knowledge in the past few decades.

As a result, every field has become more and more specialized. It is IMPOSSIBLE to know everything.

Doctors are not gods, they cannot see sickness with their X-ray vision or cure everything with a magic pill.

But most of the doctors I know do their best.