What about the good that happens in Pakistan?
The media hunts down only the bad news and presents it as trophies to the public, said the doctor receiving the award.
We are a nation full of flaws, but we have some good aspects as well which are rarely highlighted. I recently met a doctor, a pioneer in gastroenterology, who received the prominent civil award, Tamgha-e-Imtiaz, this year for his contribution to the field. During our meeting, he commented on the prevalent negativity in society.
The media hunts down only the bad news and presents it as trophies to the public, he said.
He told me about a workshop organised in March this year, where despite the travel warnings due to the security situation in Karachi, 29 international experts from the US, the UK, Italy, Japan, Singapore, India and Saudi Arabia delivered lectures and performed live, advanced surgical and endoscopic procedures.
For the first time in Pakistan, a gastric cancer patient was operated upon, without open surgery, through a technique called endoscopic submucosal dissection, pioneered in Japan.
The patient was unfit to undergo any kind of surgery, and therefore this procedure helped save his life.
Also, for the first time in our country, a new advanced endoscopic technique for assessing the bile duct, called spy glass, was used with electro-hydraulic therapy to break very large bile duct stones, thus saving patients from major open surgery.
These are major developments, especially in a country where there are hardly 400 specialists in the field of gastroenterology, and only 240 of them are registered with the Society of Gastroenterologists in Pakistan.
I was touched to see how much the doctor feels for his patients, and how driven he is towards the cause. He left a shining practice in the UK to come back to the country.
Yet, surprisingly, his faith in the country is unflinching.
This is something even I cannot boast of, despite being far younger.
Big news, right? Not really, if people do not even get to know about it.
The media hunts down only the bad news and presents it as trophies to the public, he said.
He told me about a workshop organised in March this year, where despite the travel warnings due to the security situation in Karachi, 29 international experts from the US, the UK, Italy, Japan, Singapore, India and Saudi Arabia delivered lectures and performed live, advanced surgical and endoscopic procedures.
For the first time in Pakistan, a gastric cancer patient was operated upon, without open surgery, through a technique called endoscopic submucosal dissection, pioneered in Japan.
The patient was unfit to undergo any kind of surgery, and therefore this procedure helped save his life.
Also, for the first time in our country, a new advanced endoscopic technique for assessing the bile duct, called spy glass, was used with electro-hydraulic therapy to break very large bile duct stones, thus saving patients from major open surgery.
These are major developments, especially in a country where there are hardly 400 specialists in the field of gastroenterology, and only 240 of them are registered with the Society of Gastroenterologists in Pakistan.
I was touched to see how much the doctor feels for his patients, and how driven he is towards the cause. He left a shining practice in the UK to come back to the country.
Yet, surprisingly, his faith in the country is unflinching.
This is something even I cannot boast of, despite being far younger.
Big news, right? Not really, if people do not even get to know about it.