Pendoctor

   Celebrating Christmas My brother Ikenna wanted to open his gift box on Christmas Day – 25th of December 2020. My mother did not allow him to open it. He began to cry.  “IK, wait till tomorrow. You should open your gift box on Boxing Day,” my mother told my brother. She hugged him and cleaned his tears with her hand. “Mummy, Chinyere wanted to open her gift box too,” Ikenna pointed at me. “No, mummy. It is not true. I just looked at the box,” I quickly told my mum. My mother would have frowned at me if I had not explained why I touched my gift box.  My mother made us behave properly always. She made us greet older people every time we saw them. She taught us many things including covering our mouths when we coughed. We should not pick our food to eat if it fell on the floor. We should wash our hands with soap and water after using the toilet. “Chichi, your younger brother watches what you do. Do the right things always,” she told me. Ikenna stopped crying after our...

People often request to have medical check of their bodies. When they do so, they want to have investigations done to ascertain their status in order to prevent health crises.  Truth is, medical check is an individualized assessment. Depending on the background health or disease information of the client available to the medical doctor, medical check in Mr(s) A may be different from Mr(s) B. Nevertheless, what basic tests should be done irrespective of one's previously known medical condition? General (Men and Women) Most of these tests can be done on a 1-3year-basis. Full Blood Count(FBC) . This helps to assess the entire components of the blood. Some blood cancers or other problematic diseases in the blood can be picked early if one does yearly FBC assessment. A blood sample is used. Liver Function Test . Some habits - especially excessive alcohol intake and ingestion of herbal concoction - and hepatitis viruses may slowly cause damage to the liver. One should not wait to become ...

  In most vocations, sound knowledge of the subject often translates into performance. Sex is an exception ; that an adolescent has knowledge of sex doesn't mean he or she will practise it. As concerned guardians, we often fall into the error of not discussing sex when older kids or teenagers raise the subject. We hush them into silence. Most times, the curious person goes elsewhere to get the knowledge. Unfortunately, the knowledge may be incorrect, causing problems in the future. Our fear is that if the person has knowledge of sex, he or she would prematurely engage in it. We are wrong.   Sexual education can be done in a controlled and morally-congruent manner. Our attempt to preach chastity before marriage has caused some of us to unknowingly, and unnecessarily, illegitimize sex. Young girls and ladies are often the victims of this improper sexual education. Some of them unconsciously develop phobia for sex.  In most affected women, sex phobia is the problem associate...

The medical profession can be funny at times. With years of practice, a clinician may encounter a "new" problem whose management he or she has not observed anywhere. Such cases often send the medical practitioner back to read his books. Mr A was referred to me many years ago. After the routine history taking, it was time to examine him. I picked his arm closer to me to wrap the cuff of the Blood Pressure machine around it. "Doctor, don't use this one," he suggested. "Why?" I asked. "You will not get my blood pressure," he replied as he pulled up the sleeve around the other arm for me to check the pressure. I was curious. I wanted to confirm what he meant, so I requested to first check the blood pressure on the arm he advised me not to use. An error reading flashed on the digital BP machine. He chuckled, "I told you." Error readings on BP machines could be "E1, E2 ... E5 and Er" if the BP is too high or too low to be measur...

Death is an inevitable natural phenomenon. Like birth, people die every day. Some circumstances of these deaths raise questions suggestive of probable homicide, missed diagnosis by the healthcare workers, and poor attention of the patient or their caregivers to diseases. Emotional assessments of illnesses have no place in medical practice. Once there is no objective proof of the likely cause(s) of someone’s death, autopsy or postmortem is the other option to ascertain why the person died. Autopsy is still an unpopular discussion in the general population of Nigeria due to ethno-religious and financial reasons. This piece tries to shed light on the importance of autopsy. All the cases cited below to address the relevant points are fictional. Should any appear similar to cases you know, it is a mere coincidence. 1. Mr A, a 52-year-old artisan, an unknown person in hospital B, was rushed there when he began to vomit blood copiously. Within twenty minutes of getting to the hospital, he ha...

Recently, we have some trending articles and videos of medical personnel who harvest organs of unsuspecting patients during surgery for other purposes. Most of the general public assume the personnel are doctors. The Nigerian Medical Association in the respective states ought to have started investigating them to know if they are doctors, and if they truly carried out the malpractice.  We should be reminded that the news may be false, hence, no need for panic yet.  If the news is correct, the personnel are most likely quacks (persons who practise what they have not been licensed to do) or medical doctors with criminal minds. It is difficult to identify medical doctors with criminal minds; it is, however, relatively easier to know quacks. For the sake of the general public, these three tips are helpful to identify quacks. The knowledge will safeguard your health. 1. All licensed health practitioners (nurses and doctors) display their licences in the reception or waiting area. ...