Flaunting our ‘honours’

We, medicos, are known to be vain peacocks strutting around, spreading our qualifications and professional feathers. There was a time when a cardiologist in Mumbai sported degrees and honours totalling a record 65 alphabetical characters, topped by the then popular ‘SEM’. In desperation, Bombay Telephones ruled that henceforth it would refrain from printing degrees and qualifications!

We often wonder to whose good such display is directed.

Alternative medicine is a movement geared towards weaning patients away from the glamour and glitter of allopathy. Alas! There too, overkill is achieved by prefixing and suffixing names of leading lights in a manner that, unhelpably, betrays vanity.

As an example in point, we quote from Holistic Mediscan, July 1996. Therein, a dignitary is introduced as “Lord Pandit Professor Dr. Sir Anton Jayasuriya, Chancellor OICUM”. It may be that this has some rationale in our age, governed as it is by imports from Madison Avenue – not only should drugs sell, but so should doctors!