#Dr. ​Rohin Francis

[aroldpdl]

missing him (Dr Rohin Francis)

[myscrubslife]

Get to know the blogger - medical edition

1. Why did you choose medicine as a profession?

I didn't find anything else interesting enough. Not to sound too cliché but I just can’t see myself doing anything else every single day 30-40 years from now.

2. When did you know you wanted to go into medicine?

Nana’s cardiac surgery (and my mom’s influence when she got me a doctor’s set to play with.) 🩺

3. Which specialty do you want to practice?

Internal Medicine and then eventually Cardiology 🫀 but I like Paediatrics too!

4. Which specialty did you want to practice when you started med school/nursing school?

Cardiothoracic surgeon (I ended up preferring the medical side over surgical)

5. What was your best moment in medicine? In no particular order:

🦴 Getting scrubbed in every time during my Orthopedics rotation and actively assisting the surgeries at an Intern level (not just retraction/suturing) multiple implants, hip replacements, ilizarov fixation, amputation, casts and slabs. “Interns are Tigers” is what the Orthopods said lol.

👶🏽 Intubating and performing a lumbar puncture on a neonate.

🔥 I was working at the Emergency Department during my first few days of Internship when a mass casualty came in consisting of 30 patients with different degrees of burns at a sugarcane factory nearby, I was sh*t scared initially but this experience taught me good team dynamics with all departments in an emergency situation.

6. What was your worst moment in medicine?

During initial nights of my IM rotation as an intern (in India interns are still like med students and not residents) My junior and senior resident incharges went to sleep and I felt helpless when a patient suddenly stopped breathing minutes after snoring loudly, at this point I wasn’t allowed to intubate without supervision and the residents on-call were just not ready to get up. The patient died eventually and I was crying at the staircase till 4am.

7. How does the medical education system in your country work?

5.5 years of MBBS,

3 years of PG Residency,

2+ years of Super Specialisation/fellowships

and multiple Quack practices. 🦆

8. Favourite medical fun fact?

Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy (Broken Heart Syndrome) shows apical ballooning so the shape of the heart is similar to that of a takotsubo (たこつぼ) a round-bottomed, narrow-necked vessel used to catch octopuses. 🐙

9. Funniest/weirdest thing that happened in one of our classes/rotations?

When a professor way older than me said “You have beautiful eyes” referring to me, on the mic, in the middle of a lecture. 🎤

When a resident tried hitting on me (still a student) and I rejected him but later he became my doctor when I had COVID *awkward*

10. Surgery or internal medicine?

Internal Medicine ✨ (although I do respect surgeons, they’re more fun to be around.)

11. What is your best study advise?

Revise. Slow progress is still progress. Let go of your ego, you won’t retain your knowledge if you don’t revise and eventually people will get better than you and you’ll be left behind.

12. Do you study at home/at the library/elsewhere?

Home (sometimes at the library pre-pandemic)

13. Why and when did you start your medblr?

I’ve been on Tumblr for over 10 years, somewhere during my clinical years I thought I needed to document my life in Medicine so I made a blog for it.

14. How do you treat yourself when you achieved a goal?

Good food and shopping!

15. How do you handle failure/bad critiques/mistakes?

During my internship I saw a lot of incompetent doctors (referring to my point no. 6) It motivated me even more to do my best to not be a doctor like that and only take constructive criticism and learn from my mistakes. Having a mentor helps a lot too.

16. Favourite hospital movie/TV show?

I think my username answers this question, it will always be [Scrubs]

17. Worst hospital movie/TV show?

A certain medical show named after a famous book with never ending seasons, more drama, less medical accuracy. *ahem*

18. Which patient’s/relative’s behaviour annoys you the most?

When they call me a nurse even after correcting them and are extremely rude to me because I’m young. 🥺

19. What would you do if you didn’t work in medicine?

Artist travelling around the world. 🎨

20. What do you like to do when you’re not in school/hospital/studying?

Sleeping for the most part, Anime/Manga, painting sometimes, social media and some cooking these days.

21. Do you have somebody that inspires you?

Dr. Cox & JD from [Scrubs]

My Mentor

Dr. Rohin Francis (Medlife Crisis)

[marlinspirkhall]

From “How To Do CRP In Space”, by Medlife Crisis

[Video ID] A video shows Dr Rohin Francis on a zero-gravity flight.

Rohin, sitting on top of a pillow as he demonstrates CPR: Okay, so, I, I I’ve straddled-

[starts floating while doing chest compressions]

Rohin: my counterpart-

[floats into the camera]

Rohin: and it’s- WHOA

[hits the camera]

Rohin: sorry Sebastian! So now I’m trying to-

[Now upside down]

Rohin: - give CRP like this (gasps)

[spins around 180 degrees]

Rohin: ssss-- can uhh, can I get a blood gas, please?!

[music plays, video cuts]

Rohin, now lying on the ground: For this technique, we’re gonna try and secure my feet on the ceiling and use the force-

[Obi-wan kenobi gif appears in the left hand corner]

Rohin:- to g-give chest compressions, this is known as the handstand technique

[Camera zooms out]

Rohin, readjusting his face masK: I might mess it up

Rohin, voiceover: I definitely thought that this was the pick of the bunch in terms of how good the chest compressions would be. You can use your arms, or you can lock them out and you can use your legs. I think this would give an astronaught who had suffered cardiac arrest the best chance of survival... Right until I fell on top of, and smothered them. If you want my opinion...

[video cuts]

Rohin: In Zero gravity, CPR is extrememly difficult, as I hope I’ve demonstrated to you and cardiac arrest is likely to be such a rare event that no automated chest-compressiondevice will be taken into space. So, if I have to give oyu one piece of advice regarding this topic, it would be: don’t have a cardiac arrest in space.

[video ends]

[flautist10]

If you could have dinner with 3 famous people, who would you choose?

ooh very interesting question. 

Probably i’d say Carina Vogt, Julian Brandt and Dr Rohin Francis

 (ik it’d be a very weird dinner considering those people have very little in common and one of them doesn’t speak german)

[eccentricorange]

Here's something related: https://youtu.be/PriwCi6SzLo

It's Dr Rohin Francis discussing about paid journals, with an emphasis on how it hurts science.

I havent seen anyone talk about this yet so im making a post. 

So lets say you’re researching something for a paper (or just for fun) and the research paper you want to read is behind a paywall, or the site makes you create an account first, or makes you pay to download, or limits you to only 5 free articles, or otherwise makes it difficult for you to read what you want.

do not fear! copy the link to the article

go to sci-hub.se         (the url is always changing so its best to check out whereisscihub.now.sh to find what the current url is)

slap the article link in there

bam! free access! 

[workmoneyfun]

Did The 2011 Movie 'Contagion' Predict The Coronavirus Outbreak? A Doctor Breaks It Down - Digg | Dr. Rohin Francis explores how accurately... https://digg.com/video/did-the-2011-movie-contagion-predict-the-2020-coronavirus-outbreak

[gershonposts]

Watch This Doctor Explain the 6 Reasons He's Optimistic About Beating Coronavirus

Watch This Doctor Explain the 6 Reasons He’s Optimistic About Beating Coronavirus

Dr. Rohin Francis wants people to think positively, without ignoring the seriousness of the situation.

[mens24corner]

Doctor Gives 6 Reasons to Be Optimistic About Beating Coronavirus

With the COVID-19 outbreak causing all kinds of unrest, experts are doing their best to mitigate mass panic by offering up the facts free from bias or sensationalism.

Dr Rohin Francis just posted a video to his Medlife Crisischannel on YouTube which he hopes will assuage some of the more common fears and concerns surrounding the virus, without ignoring the facts or making light of the situation.

[aroldpdl]

everyone should be watching dr rohin francis' youtube channel (medlife crisis)

[kristinsimmons]

Raj of the NHS – How doctors from India and Pakistan saved the NHS

By ROHIN FRANCIS

India and Pakistan celebrate 71 years of Independence today. The British National Health Service owes them a debt of gratitude.

Great Britain’s national dish is famously chicken curry, but South Asia’s impact on this Sceptred Isle extends far beyond food. It is a testament to how ingrained into the British psyche the stereotypical Indian doctor has become that in 2005 a poll of Brits found the doctor they’d most like to consult is a 30-something South Asian female. In 2010 the BBC even ran a popular TV series simply entitled ‘The Indian Doctor’ following a story played out across the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, that of a humble family physician from the Indian subcontinent finding his feet in a country that asked him to come over and save the still-young ‘National Health Service’.

In 1948, India and Pakistan were not yet one year old when the NHS was created. Over subsequent years, recruitment drives encouraged young doctors to make a new home in the UK. Tens of thousands answered the call and it is no exaggeration to say the NHS would not have survived without them.

Now a swollen behemoth comprising some 1.8 million staff, the NHS is the world’s fifth largest employer. It is estimated to have a bewildering shortfall of 100,000 staff. Unsurprisingly almost 40% of Tier 2 (skilled) visa applications to the UK are to take up positions in the NHS. Yet over the last 13 years, South Asian doctors have been made to feel less welcome. In the first four months of 2018 alone, 400 visa applications from Indian doctors were rejected.

Before Theresa May became Prime Minister, she introduced a rigid cap on immigration from outside the European Union and in recent years the NHS has recruited many thousands of doctors, nurses, physiologists, radiographers and numerous more healthcare workers from the EU. With Brexit months away and migration from the EU dwindling, the UK is once again turning to South Asia. In response to the growing need for healthcare professionals, one of the current Home Secretary’s first actions after his appointment was to exempt non-EU doctors and nurses from the immigration cap. Nevertheless, the health service remains desperately short-staffed.

The NHS started its life in July 1948 with the noble intention of providing health care to every British citizen, free at the point of access. This ambitious plan ran into problems almost immediately. British doctors, typically affluent white men, were reluctant to relinquish time spent in lucrative private practice nor were they keen to work in deprived areas of the country. Confusingly, in 1957 the government also cut the number of medical school places, apparently ignorant of the rapidly-expanding post-war population.

This combination of factors meant that by the 1960s, the NHS was already in danger of collapse. Waves of British doctors, fed up by their reduced pay and NHS working conditions, emigrated to the USA, Canada, and Australia. The chairman of the British Medical Association’s Committee for Planning estimated that the yearly emigration of British trained doctors amounted to between 30 and 50% of the annual number of domestic medical graduates.

It is an ironic twist of history that the man who ushered in an influx of Asian doctors would later go on to foment anti-immigrant sentiments with infamous inflammatory speeches. Enoch Powell, best remembered for his xenophobic ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, was health minister at the start of the 1960s and proposed looking to South Asia to fill the NHS’s gaps. He oversaw the arrival of 18,000 junior doctors from the subcontinent, commenting that they “provide a useful and substantial reinforcement of the staffing of our hospitals and who are an advertisement to the world of British medicine and British hospitals”.

Ten medical schools had been founded by the British during their colonial occupation of India and as others sprung up, there were soon thousands of medical graduates, trained in English and in a similar manner to British medical schools. Great Britain also looked to the west for its nurses, imploring considerable numbers to come from countries like Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana, just as independence was sweeping through the Caribbean

There was a steady influx of South Asian doctors from the 1960s until the 1990s. Their experiences were varied but also striking in their common themes. Bright-eyed junior doctors set foot in the land of their former colonial masters, determined to make waves as renowned cardiologists or surgeons but instead faced institutional racism and career dead-ends.

They were corralled into so-called ‘Cinderalla specialties’; overlooked, underfunded and distinctly unglamorous. Many found themselves in old age psychiatry, genitourinary medicine, and geriatric medicine. Modern geriatricians often credit the influx and enthusiasm of South Asian doctors for shaping the critical specialty it has become today.

The majority were given no option but to work as GPs (general practitioners) in deprived areas such as rural mining communities or crime-ridden inner cities. While dreams of ascending the ranks of their Royal College slipped away, Asians found themselves the only doctors willing to work in areas serving the very people the NHS had been founded to assist – the poor. Collected accounts of doctors working through these decades consistently name the ability to have a direct impact on impoverished communities as the most rewarding aspect of their job.

In 1961, one of the country’s most pre-eminent doctors, the 1st Baron Cohen of Birkenhead, addressed the House of Lords, stating “the Health Service would have collapsed if it had not been for the enormous influx from junior doctors from such countries as India and Pakistan”.

So dependent upon these doctors had the NHS become, that a transcript from the Ministry of Health fretted over the possible effect of an (albeit short-lived) war between India and Pakistan:

“…Dr. Elliott of the MPU is reported as saying that the NHS was in danger of collapsing, possibly within the next few months, because of diminishing manpower. The war between India and Pakistan might result in the recall to India and Pakistan of doctors from British hospitals which could, therefore, face paralysis within weeks … The same unpleasant thought had occurred to us and we have been considering what we can do.”

Yet analysis of correspondence to the British Medical Journal over the ensuing decades revealed a steady stream of objection to these new foreign colleagues.

By the 1970s South Asian doctors had become a familiar sight in the UK. In 1971 just over one-third of workers in the English NHS were from overseas. The fact so many Asian GPs had been allocated oversubscribed single-handed practices in isolated areas meant many faced overt racism. However, the majority became integrated pillars of their communities, respected as trusted doctors when general practice had not yet achieved the status of other medical specialties. The start of the decade also saw Bangladesh win independence from Pakistan, the UK vote to join the European Union and Idi Amin forcibly eject around 60,000 Indians and Pakistanis. Almost 30,000 of them made their new homes in the UK, again bolstering the NHS workforce.

In 1972, disquiet amongst the famously conservative British medical fraternity had persuaded the General Medical Council to cease recognizing Indian medical graduation as sufficient for registration to practice in the UK, establishing yet another hurdle for the new recruits, still so desperately needed the ever-expanding NHS.

When the 1980s arrived, 16% of GPs working in England and Wales had been born in India, Pakistan (including what would later become Bangladesh) and Sri Lanka. However, when examining inner cities this figure could rise to in excess of 50%. In 2003, 73% of GPs working in the underprivileged Rhondda Valley in Wales were of South Asian origin.

Racism and discrimination have been constant experiences for all overseas workers throughout the history of the NHS. Nurses, doctors, and other healthcare professionals found themselves unable to achieve positions of responsibility, earn equal pay and unsuccessful when applying for prestigious jobs. This has led to several professional bodies acknowledging and apologizing for this unfortunate legacy.

Today you are almost as likely to see a Dr. Patel as a Dr. Smith in the UK. There are 1724 Dr. Patels in the UK (in contrast to 1750 Dr. Smiths). Recent figures from the General Medical Council suggest around 29,000 doctors practicing in the UK graduated in India and 7,500 in Pakistan. Overall around a third of NHS doctors gained their medical degree outside the UK.

Jawaharlal Nehru’s legendary Independence speech ushered in the birth of two giant nations at the stroke of midnight precisely 71 years ago. He spoke of the tryst with destiny made by a colonized people, redeemed as they won freedom from the British Empire. At the end of the twentieth century, Britons voted the NHS as one of their greatest ever achievements and this monumental institution has ensured the United Kingdom and South Asia have remained intrinsically linked.

A perpetual political football, the NHS limps on with a drastic staff shortfall and continued dependency on imported labour. The first waves of South Asian doctors have retired and once again, home-grown medics are reluctant to work in the deprived parts of the country that are now on the hunt for young doctors. With Great Britain and Northern Ireland leaving the EU, it may well be a tryst with destiny that sees doctors and nurses from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka once again keep the NHS afloat.

Rohin Francis is a cardiology fellow and PhD candidate in London. He makes YouTube videos about medicine which have no clinical utility. He once drove an autorickshaw from Kathmandu to Kerala. He can be reached @MedCrisis

    Raj of the NHS – How doctors from India and Pakistan saved the NHS published first on https://wittooth.tumblr.com/