Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Indian journalist and author Vir Sanghvi riled up a section of Twitter with his recent tweet about doctors.
Sanghvi quote-tweeted a post which had an image of a frame with the words, “Please don’t confuse your Google search with my medical degree.”
Vir wrote, “Yeah but my Google search was five minutes ago. Your medical degree may have been 20 years ago... Do you read journals? Do you keep up with advances in your field?” These are the questions we should ask.”
The journo’s comment invited flak from a section of netizens on the microblogging platform.
One user wrote, “If you have got the knowledge from Google then why did you came to me? Check my knowledge? 2nd opinion? Point here is if you don't trust please come to me.”
“Come on... cannot believe this is coming from you Vir. In my experience, not one of my patients was guided correctly by these google searches and all they had was heightened apprehensions. U can’t compare our knowledge with this stupidity,” added another.
In subsequent tweets, while replying to the comments, Sanghvi wrote, “You should be prepared to answer questions from your patients based on their own research. Only an arrogant fool puts up signs like that disparaging a patient’s right to research his own ailments.”
“Nobody says don’t go to doctors. All I want to know is why do doctors get so hostile about patients googling their own symptoms that they need to put up boards like that. Arrogance? Insecurity?” he added.
Here are some more reactions on Twitter.
Meanwhile, doctors and health professionals around the world are working day and night to tend the increasing number of COVID-19 patients.
The overall number of global coronavirus cases has crossed the 30 million mark, while the deaths have increased to more than 944,000, according to the Johns Hopkins University.
As of Friday morning, the total number of cases stood at 30,065,728 and the fatalities rose to 944,604, the University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) revealed in its latest update.
The US is the worst-hit country with the world's highest number of cases and deaths at 6,674,070 and 197,615, respectively, according to the CSSE.
India is currently in second place in terms of cases at 5,118,253, while the country's death toll soared to 83,198.
