Apollo Hospital (Hyderabad) accused of kidney theft

Nikhil

The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : High drama at Apollo Hospital

Family members of a patient who died while undergoing treatment demonstrated for over four hours at the Apollo Hospital in Jubilee Hills on Monday alleging that his kidney had been stolen.

However, the victim's family members preferred not to lodge any complaint.

A third year engineering student, G. Rahul Kumar, 21, was admitted to the hospital on Sunday morning with pneumonia. His father Prakash Rao said that Kumar was normal till the early hours of Monday.

According to him, at 4.30 a.m., his son overheard two nurses talking about removing his kidney. "My doubts of kidney theft strengthened when they declared my son dead after an hour," he told reporters at the hospital.

The demonstration took a serious turn with 300 students of Karshak Engineering College, Uppal, joining the agitating family members. The police rushed additional forces to tackle any eventuality. Later, Kumar's family members urged the hospital management to pay compensation for the doctors' negligence but the latter turned down their demand. Finally, the victim's family members called off their demonstration saying they did not want autopsy of the body in the name of investigation and took the body to their village in Jadcherla of Mahbubnagar for cremation.

My opinion

I dont want to sound rude or offensive, but somehow, this smells like the family tried to make a quick buck. I know I am going to get flamed for this, but my take on this is that once the boy had died, the family made up the story just to try to extort some money from the hospital.

Then they rejected the autopsy and immediately cremated the body.

If they really felt that they were meted out injustice, then all they had to do was wait for the autopsy to be done and the report to be made.

On the other hand, maybe the hospital staff really were upto some nonsense and the family in their grief decided that nothing would bring back the boy and just gave up......
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dipdude

^ I have to agree with you - maybe its not the family but some over-zealous friend/well wisher running his imagination wild.

If they believed that the Kidney in fact had been stolen then best course of action would have been to go along with autopsy and bring the culprits to book.

OR you never know - maybe it is true and ultimately Money Prevailed.

Whatever the case - a sad ending to an young life

medpal

first and foremost :

the report says he was sufferring from pneumonia, why the hell any one remove kidneys when the treatment is medical only. was he operated for any kind of treatment?

secondly if he was operated then what was the indication?, which organ was involved?

i doubt if a person who is on critical terminal illness will have enough sharpness to overhear nurses conversation correctly and apprehand it and also convey it to his realtives, this is a miracle, i have seen it only in movies.

so this episode seems to be a publicity and money making stunt to me.

this is not as i am a doctor but the facts which have come around and what has been reported.

Now another point of view :
the patient or patients relatives misinterpretation of events:
there are conditions where kidneys have failed due to some underlying cause like fulminant infection, poor oxygen supply, other ailments. this may herald a necessitates patient to under go dialysis.

while on treatment kidneys may not recover their function and end up damaging the body more, then it becomes imperative to remove them and stabilise patient with artifical life support system and them transplant the new kidney.

so the conversation may be on a possible plan of treatment and misinterpretated by patient / realtives.

anyways may god rest his soul in piece and bless his relatives with courage to bear the loss.