PESHAWAR, Dec 3: The citizens have expressed concern over consultants’ practice of treating patients without first properly diagnosing the cause of illness through laboratory tests.

“Patients admitted to hospital wards, specially to medical units, are usually treated on the basis of symptoms. In most of the cases no clinical tests are done to diagnose their cause of illness because of lack of interest on the part of the physicians,” said a junior registrar at one of the teaching hospitals.

He said teaching hospitals were supposed to thoroughly examine the chronically-ill patients, but more often these patients were treated symptomatically. They were given drugs by doctors who just checked their physical appearance, made up their mind and advised them medicines, the registrar said.

Most of the patients complain that the physicians did not take interest in diagnosing their ailments and prescribe them treatment accordingly.

“Even the senior consultants do not pay attention to the diagnostic aspect of the treatment. They just put the patients on high doses of antibiotics, which causes more harm to patients,” said a doctor who is doing house job at one of the city hospitals.

A patient while narrating his tale, said he was brought to the medical ward of a local hospital with running temperature. The consultant, he said, immediately prescribed anti-malarial, analgesic drugs without bothering to ascertain the real cause of his problem.

Meanwhile, he said some routine tests, including X-ray, blood and urine tests, were carried out which showed no abnormality and he was discharged after being treated with eight types of antibiotics.

“Doctors usually visited patients in the morning and in the evening hours. During the evening visit, doctors stopped the drugs which had been prescribed in the morning by their seniors, whereas the next day senior doctors put him on other medicines,” said Mohammad Raees.

A senior doctor said teaching hospitals were supposed to examine a patient but physicians did not take interest in diagnosis and patients suffered ultimately. He said consultants visited wards, but they also had to attend OPDs and deliver lectures at the Khyber Medical College, which left very little time for them to thoroughly examine about 40 patients admitted to the hospital.

Most of the patients admitted with high fever were discharged without being diagnosed, a doctor said, adding that the diagnosis column of the discharged slips of the patients were often marked as PUO (proxia unknown organ), which means undiagnosed.