Doctor’s Death Sparks Debate

A fatal attack by a hospital patient underscores a lack of trust in China’s doctors.

2012.03.27
china-hospital-305 Staff at a hospital in Beijing, Feb. 29, 2012.
AFP

A teenager brutally assaulted four medical doctors, killing one of them, in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang province in a case that has sparked heated debate among netizens on rising medical costs and quality of service.

On Friday, an 18-year-old youth surnamed Li, a patient in the First Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, went on a rampage, stabbing the four medical staff with a fruit knife. One of them died while the others were seriously injured.

Li told the police that he had attacked the doctors because they had refused to treat his condition.

He had been diagnosed with the inflammatory condition ankylosing spondylitis last year, but when doctors said that his tuberculosis had to be treated first, he assumed that the doctors were trying to cheat him out of his money.

Online poll

The incident hit a nerve among China’s netizens, stirring online discussion about doctor-patient relations and the cost and quality of medical care, as some sympathized with the young man’s lack of trust in his doctors.

One poll on QQ.com, one of China’s most popular web portals and the home of its largest instant messaging network, showed that 4,000 out of 6,000 pollsters said they were “happy” about the news of the incident.

“The shocking incident once more reminds us that there is not even a minimal level of mutual trust between patients and doctors in today’s China,” said Li Zheng, a doctor in Zhejiang province.

“Patients always suspect doctors are stealing their money by intimidating them with false statements about their illnesses and giving them unnecessary and excessively expensive prescriptions.”

“Every day, no matter how hard I explain it to them, they don’t believe me,” he said.

Dishonest practices

One human rights activist said that patients’ complaints about dishonest medical practices are on the rise.

“As a patient, I personally experienced medical behaviors that don’t meet the basic ethics of the profession,” said Liu Feiyue, an activist in Hubei province.

Liu called for effective communication between medical staff and patients to reduce the tension.

“I once launched a signature-collecting campaign to call for reduction of medicine prices, and for separation of doctor’s pay and the sale of medicine. But things have not changed for the better,” Liu said.

A similar incident occurred in Beijing last September, when an angry cancer patient, Wang Baoming, attacked his doctor with a kitchen knife, leaving her with 17 stab wounds.  Wang had blamed the surgeon for making his cancer worse after her failed attempt at removing his laryngeal tumor years earlier.

Reported by Xin Yu for RFA’s Mandarin service. Translated by Ping Chen. Written in English by Rachel Vandenbrink.

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