As part of its 50th-anniversary celebration, the Medical Council of Thailand has launched a 12-part cartoon series titled Doctor Series, offering a glimpse into life as a doctor.
With a lot of legal disputes and controversies facing Thai medical practitioners these days, this cartoon series might come at just the right time. It might help spread the message about what doctors, nurses and other medical professionals are actually up to, what struggles they are facing in real life as well as the sacrifices they have brought, unbeknownst to many.
Released every Wednesday on the Medical Council's Facebook page since Aug 1, the newest episode, Emergency, More Emergency, was just posted on Wednesday.
The first episode, A Surgeon's Night Life, has been shared many times on social media. It tells the story of a surgeon who is chronically overworked and in the end his physical exhaustion ends up costing his life in a car accident. The story is wrapped with a clear message citing statistics from the Medical Council of Thailand collected from 2008-2017, revealing that 90% of deaths among doctors aged between 25 and 50 were traffic-related, often in consequence of work-induced sleep deprivation.
The second episode, Nowhere To Stand, highlights mental health in the country, in light of depressive disorders and other psychological conditions being stigmatised and mental patients discriminated against -- at work or elsewhere.
The other parts of Doctors Series tackle additional current healthcare subjects, including the perils of penis-enlargement surgery, dengue-fever risks and labour-related deaths. Again, each episode wraps up with a useful warning message and statistical data. The episode about dengue fever, How Can You Die From Just A Fever?, for example, says that over 50,000 Thais suffer from dengue fever each year, according to the Bureau of Vector Borne Disease under the Ministry of Public Health's Department of Disease Control. Each year, 60 deaths are reported, although patients are often in the hands of doctors, simply because there is no specific medicine to treat a dengue infection. All episodes of Doctor Series so far have stimulated lively discussion and been shared many times on Facebook.
Doctor Series can be viewed at facebook.com/pg/thaimedcouncil.
