Don’t trust the butchers!

Mohammed Al-Hassani Makkah I read in a local newspaper an article stating that 6,000 amputation procedures are performed annually in the Kingdom’s hospitals. Half of these are done on diabetic patients who have affected limbs due to the severity of their situation. The other half is related to car accidents. I remembered while reading the news a medical report another local newspaper published a while ago. The report prepared by a famous German doctor claimed that 80 percent of amputation procedures that are completed in hospitals around the world are not required and could have been avoided by treating the affected part of the body. At the time, this piece of information got stuck to my brain. After I published my views in a column I met a friend of mine who resided in Makkah and worked as an engineer in the electricity company. Upon his retirement, he received his end of service reward and bought an apartment in London to spend the summer and spring there with his old wife. His children moved out of the house after getting married and no one lived with him. I understood from my friend that he suffered due to complications from diabetes because he struggled with it for 40 years. One day I noticed that the big toe on his right foot started turning black after a small bump in the stairs. He rushed to a large private hospital in Makkah where the doctors decided to amputate his toe because — as they said — he had gangrene. He almost went with the operation but he consulted with a friend who advised him to travel to London and get a second opinion — especially that he had valid medical insurance and residence there. The doctors in London were very upset with the diagnosis to amputate and treated the toe until it went back to its normal state without amputation or anything else. When I connected the dots between my friend’s experience and what I read in the German report, I started advising everyone who is diabetic not to trust any of the “butchers” before making sure first that the situation truly needs an amputation or not. But many who listened to my advice would look at me in despair as if saying: “Where can we get the money that could finance an operation abroad?”