Cash
for Prescription
January Last year, little
Chinese boy Dongdong lost his battle
against Thalassemia and passed away. What
saddens his parents most is that he hadn’t
died of the illness but the treatment
that meant to cue the illness.
It all started when Dongdong’s
mom spotted an online advertisement on
the official website of a Guangzhou
hospital, proclaiming a 93 percent of
success rate for marrow transplant
operation done by Doctor Zhu, a senior
pediatrician at the hospital. She
applied.
Prior to and after the
operation, Doctor Zhu urged her to
purchase an important super drug from a
man surnamed Wang, priced at massive 4500
yuans a dose. Shortly after taking the
drug, the boy developed a complication
– he began vomiting and urinating blood
up to 40 times a day, which eventually
killed him.
Dongdong is not alone.
Between July 2004 and September 2005,
Doctor Zhu performed marrow transplant on
15 children, from which he pocketed 4000
yuans of gift cashes from the parents,
not counting the commissions he got from
that fake drug smuggler Wang.
It is up to his young
patients and their families to bear the
grave consequences of his cold-blooded
acts. Some families have to sell their
property or run into huge debts to pay
the medical bills that amount to as much
as 900,000 yuans. But this is nothing
comparing to the young lives lost. Of 15
his patients, 9 died, thanks to his fake
super drug.
Yet this is not an isolated
case.
Medical practitioners,
particularly those dominant Western
Medicine heavyweights, are viewed by many
Chinese as one of the most corrupt groups
in today’s China – just a little
behind the property developers - and cash
for prescription practice is common. A
few years back during the Sars crisis
they were called White Angles, now they’re
more frequently referred as White Snakes.
Early this year, when China’s
Health Ministry finally decided to take
an action, 200 million yuans of drug
commission were forced to hand over. But
this is believed to be only the tip of
the iceberg.
Yet the greedy of some of
them are just boundless. In order to
achieve a total dominance of the market,
they keep lobbying for eliminating the
cost effective Chinese Herble Medicine
that Chinese people have relied on for
health care for thousands of years. In a
recent farcical petition drama initiated
by an America-based Western Medicine
doctor and a philosophy teacher in China
that calls for the exclusion of the
Chinese Medicine from the national health
care system, the majority of the
signiture bearers, as it is disclosed,
are the Western Medicine practitioners.
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