#BTEditorial – Too many losing faith in traditional medicine

The local medical fraternity must be growing increasingly worried and distressed that the influence of their white coats appears to be waning at a rate that is unprecedented.

The questioning of medical advice, the abundance of outlandish conspiracies and deliberate disinformation are now so prevalent that some people have more faith in their Google search or Facebook timelines, than they do in the professionals who have made medicine their life’s study and work.

As the COVID-19 pandemic drags into a second full year and we remain fully in its grips, citizens’ tolerance levels for advice, admonition, guidance, and medical prescription are falling rapidly.

There is a heightened level of suspicion, angst, and impatience with this disease and the litany of maladies that have accompanied it.  The desire for respite from the pandemic and a return to normalcy has overtaken rational thinking by some of our citizens.

The development is not unique to us in Barbados. It appears that those who operate in the medical profession have seemingly gone from hero to zero.

It is a most sad situation. When the pandemic was on the rise, it was to the medical professionals and health care workers that we turned. We valued their opinions and direction. We clapped for them and knocked pots and pans each night to show just how much cared.

It is unfortunate that despite the thousands who have been sickened and the close to 250 who have died so far on the island, some still seek to diminish the severity of COVID-19 and promote false and dangerous prescriptions to treat it.

Hundreds of people who are unwell with COVID-19 are refusing to be intubated or be taken to one of the designated facilities to receive medical attention. They are questioning the medication being prescribed to them, and they are highly suspicious of vaccines.

The whole situation has become an agonising battle for the hearts and minds of ordinary people who have become confused by the overload of information confronting them from every direction.

President of the Barbados Association of Medical Practitioners (BAMP), Dr Lynda Williams has been the face of the fraternity on the island and has often been the bearer of news that few of our citizens want to hear.

She and fellow doctors have recommended much more intense restrictions that limit the movement of people. It is a position that has brought BAMP into direct collision with the local business community who want Barbadians to freely spend some of those funds they have been consolidating in the local financial system.

Government, on the other hand, is starved of tax revenue and is dependent on increased local and foreign investment.

After reeling from months of economic slowdown and anaemic tourism activity, the current administration is understandably reticent to impose restrictions that will further hamper a resurgence of the tourism industry that was hobbled for nearly two years.

Now as the Government touts the “falling infection rate”, Dr Williams and BAMP are saying “not so fast”.

With Barbados still in the throes of a Delta variant wave of infections, the BAMP president has cautioned that it is too early to lift curfew restrictions because of the unknowns associated with the new Omicron variant which is spreading fast around the globe.

“The variants are our concern. We don’t know enough about them; it’s too early to tell. Anything that is more transmissible is more dangerous,” she said about Omicron, and any other variant derived from the quickly mutating SARS virus which causes the COVID-19 disease.

“There is no way that we can extrapolate to the extent that I hear some people saying. We extrapolate for those small studies in South Africa which is a whole population, and that is mild at best. We have to exercise extreme caution and negotiate the interests of each group without jeopardising the health of the population,” Dr Williams has cautioned.

The problem for BAMP is that people are tired of hearing about what they cannot do. They want freedom to gather with family and friends at Christmas time and they want to fete on Old Year’s Night and return home when it is convenient for them.

But frontline workers also want a break too. They are frustrated and exhausted. They are tired of the hostility and trying to convince patients to see things their way.

As one doctor lamented recently, those who do not hear will have to feel. We pray that not too many more will have to feel the ultimate weight of COVID-19.