It is much truer today, the observation that in the rural areas, man people die without seeing a doctor. With quite a number leaving for abroad or taking up nursing, hospitals and clinics may be replaced by medicine houses manned by herbolarios and other people who use incantation to treat the sick.
That is going back further in time when medicine men were more adept in the use of herbal drugs and incantations. But if the exodus of doctors is not halted, the country will head into the Middle Ages.
It is not a very enticing prospect.
Doctors and nurses have found our country the least attractive to practice their professions because of what many have described as starvation pay, enough to keep body and soul together.
Probably, that is stretching the description too far but with the prices of everything from gasoline to salt to pandesal going up every week, a doctor’s salary of over Php 20,000 a month does not inspire much love for the land of one’s birth.
And so doctors pack up and leave despite painful separation from loved ones, the terrible loneliness they face. They know they cannot live decently here.
The Camarines Sur provincial health office has reported that 50 vacancies for doctors have no applicants. Even nurses, according to a health official, rarely stay for months. After gaining experience, they leave, some never looking back.
Lack of doctors is acutely felt in other provinces. In Albay, over a year ago, a Bicol College graduate student learned that dozens of doctors were in nursing schools their eyes set on jobs in the US and Europe.
No one can blame them for this dream. In the US, the monthly salary of a nurse is reported equivalent to her one year income in the Philippines. Or even more. With the money, she can free her family from poverty.
The good life which cannot be had at home is a very powerful attraction to young people seeking a place under the sun. No wonder, about 3,000 people are leaving the country daily, according to the Department of labor and Employment to seek greener pastures.
To government officials, this is brain drain, the exodus of highly skilled professionals out of the country. Other dub it as a hemorrhage, a far stronger term, to describe the continuing diaspora, the flight of Filipinos out of our shore.
With many of the best minds using their talents in the service of foreign countries, the Philippines is left, with little of her bright sons and daughters. But who knows, even these youngsters are thinking of leaving.
Lack of doctors, for instance, means that more people in the rural areas will die without seeing one. In northern Catanduanes years ago, the occasional visit of a doctor was a big event. That was when physicians were plentiful. The condition is far worse today.
There is one advantage. Rural folks who cannot afford a doctor and high- priced medicines won’t have to dig deep into their pockets while visiting herbolarios. The herbs men do not charge sky high nor sell expensive drugs. But their herbs and magic are effective.
Instead of hospitals and clinics, we may have big nipa houses where the sick are treated by herbolarios in colorful attire assisted by equally finely robed attendants.
That is much better than having no berbolarios at all.
