During my last visit to the British capital of London, a family member had a minor accident, so one of our friends arranged a visit for her with an osteopathist in a private hospital in London. After accompanying the patient, it was clear to me that it was one of the best private hospitals.
After entering the hospital I was surprised by the number of Arab and Muslim patients in the waiting hall, so I started applying some of the medical statistics’ theories that I studied in college, trying to estimate the number of Arab patients. I was surprised to find out that the percentage was between 80-90% of the total number of regular patients. Later, I had the chance to ask a doctor about the percentage of Arab patients who come to the hospital and he answered that about 90% of them come to the hospital during the summer and no less than 70% during the rest of the year. With other similar questions, I found out that a lot of Arab patients come from their countries to receive treatment in that hospital and spend a lot of money year round to treat chronic and cancerous diseases and other conditions that require a long recovery period.
I was very disappointed by the situation, for knowing the following facts:
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Medicine is one of the few non-prohibited sciences in the third world. Information, research and studies available in this field in particular, as well as international ethics – as defined by decision makers in major countries – call for allowing medical information to be available for everyone, unlike the rest of sciences and inventions. This allowed most – if not all – modern technologies and medical devices to be for sale. In addition, some developed countries such as the United States claim their responsibility and priority to train people in the third world in the medical field to improve the medical conditions in their countries.
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Arab and Muslim doctors compete with Western doctors in Europe and America, and some of them – even hundreds of them without exaggeration – reached leading positions in universities and medical schools in the West, and tens of them became heads of departments and chancellors.
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The financial factor and status was not an obstacle for many Arab countries during the past two decades. In fact, many Arab countries enjoyed a great financial balance, and one of the aspects of that prosperity is the competition we see over luxuries in food, clothing and housing.
So why do all these patients travel for thousands of miles and do not care about spending fortunes on medical treatment in private hospitals owned by people in the West, and they do so without any questions or objections, while they would not pay similar amounts in their countries?
Did our hospitals fail to meet the same quality of treatment in Western hospitals?
Or is it just the inferiority complex or the “Caucasian Complex”?
Or could it be a little bit of each?
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