The Goddess As A Rural Health Worker
By Dr. Vidit Panchal
“The Goddess told me to do so”
The road to a healthcare centre that provides affordable, appropriate, rational services is often full of faith healers, quacks and heartless private practitioners- each of whom lightens the patients’ wallets and leave them uninformed on a trail to the right destination at the end. Among these, the faith healers have always amused me. They are not essentially ill-intended as the other two. In their belief, they are keeping a tradition alive.
And traditions evolve, sometimes in a funny way.
Such a realization happened today at the clinic, when a young woman of 21, Kamla (name changed) came to us with her husband. Visibly pale, she had been having a low grade fever every evening, progressive weakness and a cough which was occasionally with sputum for the last 15 days. She had also lost some weight in the last one month. Textbook Tuberculosis. I mean, it really doesn’t get any simpler than that. As I reached for my stethoscope to listen to her chest, she took out a neat Chest X-Ray out of an envelope. Her husband took it from her hand and said,
“Sir, daag hai chhati me” (Sir, there are patches in the chest) while holding the X-ray film against the window.
Which surprised me of course but what surprised me even more was to have a patient with frank symptoms of Tuberculosis arriving pretty much on time (in 2 weeks!) with a good quality X-ray film on her own. This is a rare sight in the area where we work. Patients with Tuberculosis come to us via all the market players, severely ill, bone-skinned, often depressed and with few ounces of breaths and hopes. The bright-eyed Kamla was none of that.
“Who told you this” I asked, still surprised.
“Sir Vo Devi ne bataya” (Sir, the Goddess told us”)
“Really? How and when ?” I was looking for a joke.
“We went to the Bavsi (one of the terms for faith-healers) when she fell sick, who then spoke to the Goddess and after a minute of meditation and praying, he conveyed to us the Goddess’s words”, the husband told a factual story.
“And the words were ……” I rolled a pen in my hand.
“The Goddess had told us to do an X-ray. How could we defy? So we got it done and went to the Bavsi again. Without even opening the envelope he told us another message by the Goddess, that my wife has bad patches in her chest and I need to take her to the clinic“, the husband was relieved to have fulfilled the command. “The goddess told me to do so, I had to” He reiterated his pride.
As much as I found it amusing, it made me stare at my stethoscope with some thoughts:
How interestingly ‘right’ information moves and evolves in communities. How traditions, like an AI tool, learn from what ‘works’. How your competitor, the faith healer, can cooperate with you too if there is a commensal benefit. How the persistence of a scientifically sound health service affects the community’s psyche and how poetically, science becomes ‘folk’ slowly.
Maybe a small incident like this doesn’t entirely satisfy these thoughts. But while I delve into the various hypotheses they inspire, it definitely helps to know that the local Goddess in this village has decided to play by our side 
We were able to diagnose Kamla, start her on anti-TB treatment early and do a mental health assessment as well, a seemingly simple package of services still not accessible timely to a large number of patients with Tuberculosis.
Only if I could offer that Goddess a job…….
