Editorial
Tyranny of quacks
Need for medicare outreach
The plight of a minor boy due to wrong treatment by a village kabiraj (fake healer) at a remote village in Rangpur district has again brought to the fore the vulnerability of poor and ignorant villagers at the hands of impostors and fake healers.
The victim in question is a boy of 11 belonging to a poor household who broke his left arm in a bicycle accident. The boy was taken to the Dimla upazila health complex by his father when agents of Abu kabiraj, ganged up on them and forced them into taking the kabiraj's treatment resulting in severe sepsis in the boy's arm. And thanks to his relative's sympathy and good sense to report the matter to the residential doctor of the upazila and his subsequent intervention that proper treatment could be arranged for the boy at the Rangpur Merdical College Hospital. Thus the boy's life could be saved.
Considering the circumstances of the child's predicament, it is a mere stroke of good luck that he finally could receive proper treatment. Otherwise his fate would be like that of numberless others whose miseries never come to light.
What is of utmost concern is that the victim and his father were virtually under duress to take the fake healer's treatment. As the story goes, the quack's agents took advantage of the fact that the upazila health complex was closed when the wounded boy and his father arrived there.
The misery of the young boy and his parents again demonstrates the callousness of the health complex authorities in question, on the one hand, and poor accessibility as well as paucity of primary healthcare services in the outlying villages, on the other. Ignorance and superstition of the villagers compound their predicaments further.
While there is a crying need for creating necessary awareness and spreading education among the villagers so that they may keep fake healers and fraudsters at arm's length, it is also important that primary healthcare services have to be expanded into deep interiors of the country.
Finally, the fake healer Abu and his cohorts deserve to be arrested and awarded exemplary punishment for their crime.
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