There are some phone calls that divide life into a “before” and an “after.”
A few days ago, I received one such call. Dr. Aditya Batra was gone.
I sat stunned with the phone in my hands for several minutes. Aditya was only 45. He was my junior from Medical College, Rohtak. Over the years he had become a dear friend, and more importantly, one of the pioneers and leaders in interventional cardiology in Haryana, who spent his life reopening blocked arteries, restoring blood flow and saving thousands of patients. He had also started participating in political activities and advocacy events to make a difference at the policy level.
The irony is almost unbearable. A man who devoted his life to saving hearts lost his own as he felt unwell after working and left his hospital to go home and rest.
Since that day, I have found myself thinking about him repeatedly and found myself asking a question that is becoming louder by the day: why are we losing so many seemingly healthy people in their forties, and why do doctors themselves appear to be increasingly vulnerable?
Aditya’s death is deeply personal to me. Sadly, it is not an isolated story.
As someone who has spent decades in healthcare, I have watched the profile of heart disease change. It is no longer a condition that we associate only with advancing age. Increasingly, it affects people who are in the most productive years of their lives—building careers, raising children, caring for parents and juggling responsibilities that only seem to increase with time. Many of them look fit and continue working until the day they collapse. Until the day of that dreaded phone call.
The people who met me and talked to me after this tragedy had many questions. Why did it happen to him? He was so young and energetic. Was it stress? Was it genetics? Was it lifestyle? I believe the answer is usually a combination of all these factors.
Genes certainly matter, but the world we live in today is very different from the one many of us entered as young doctors. Long working hours, poor sleep, constant connectivity, unhealthy eating, physical inactivity, smoking, obesity, diabetes, hypertension and air pollution all add up over time. Stress, by itself, does not suddenly block an artery. Yet persistent stress raises blood pressure, worsens blood sugar control, disturbs sleep, fuels inflammation and encourages unhealthy habits. Over time, these changes begin to matter.
Doctors are usually the worst offenders when it comes to looking after themselves, as I have noticed in my friends and colleagues, and as famously, the Framingham Heart Study pointed out.
Over the years, our profession started celebrating this self-neglect. We admire the surgeon who has not taken leave for years, the physician who answers calls at midnight after a full day in the OPD, or the intensivist who continues working despite having a fever himself. We call it dedication.
We need to get out of this self delusion and call this behaviour out..
Ignoring our own health does not make us better doctors. It simply makes us vulnerable patients, unable to protect ourselves and hurting those closest to us.
This, however, is not just a medical profession problem. I see the same pattern among entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, lawyers, teachers, police officers and countless others. We have normalised a culture where being busy is mistaken for being successful. Phones remain switched on. Emails continue long into the night. Vacations are interrupted. Sleep is negotiated away. We behave as though the body will quietly tolerate whatever demands we place upon it.
Unfortunately, the heart keeps its own account.
The encouraging part is that many of these tragedies can be prevented.
The first step is awareness. Every adult should know their blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, body weight and waist circumference. Those with diabetes, hypertension, obesity, smoking or a family history of premature heart disease need to be even more vigilant. Feeling perfectly well should never be confused with being free of risk.
We also need to stop dismissing warning symptoms. Chest discomfort, breathlessness while walking, unusual fatigue, pain spreading to the jaw or left arm, dizziness, palpitations or unexplained sweating deserve attention. Heart attacks do not always unfold dramatically as they do in films. Particularly in women and people living with diabetes, the symptoms can be surprisingly subtle. Waiting for them to become severe may cost precious time and lead to irreversible changes, and in the worst case scenarios as happened with Aditya, we may lose a precious life..
Another misconception I encounter frequently, and which my patients repeatedly talk to me about, is the belief that a normal annual health check-up guarantees safety. It does not. A normal ECG or treadmill test should not be interpreted as lifelong reassurance. It does not take away the need for a healthy lifestyle with good diet and exercise. Good medicine is about assessing an individual’s overall risk. Depending on the person’s age, family history and clinical profile, additional investigations such as coronary calcium scoring or CT coronary angiography may sometimes be appropriate. My objective in prescribing tests to my patients is not to create anxiety; it is to identify disease before it announces itself through an irreversible catastrophe.
The solutions, in principle, are remarkably ordinary and easy to implement.
Regular exercise. Adequate sleep. Nutritious food. Avoiding tobacco. Moderating your alcohol intake. Maintaining a healthy weight. Learning to disconnect from work periodically. Spending time with family and friends. Seeking help when stress becomes overwhelming. Remember that the 4 S in your life are poisons for your heart. Sugar, Smoking, Sitting and Stress.
I know these recommendations because I give them to my patients every single day.
The real question is whether we doctors follow them ourselves.
Individual responsibility, however, can take us only so far. Organisations have responsibilities too. Hospitals, companies, schools, factories and public institutions must recognise that human beings are not machines. Sensible duty rosters, adequate staffing, access to mental health support, protected leave, healthy workplace environments and periodic health screening should not be viewed as mere employee benefits nor should they be seen as what sometimes our older generation doctors label as softening the workforce needed for a hard job. They are investments in healthier, more productive lives. They will create doctors and other professionals that can last longer in their jobs and make a difference to more lives while staying healthier and happier.
As doctors, perhaps we need one more lesson that our medical colleges rarely teach us.
Resilience is not the ability to keep working endlessly without rest. It is the wisdom to recognise our own limits, to seek help when we need it and to remember that caring for ourselves is not selfish. It is part of caring for our patients, our families and our loved ones.
I wish I were writing this article under different circumstances.
I wish Aditya were still with us, doing what he loved most—treating patients, mentoring young doctors and creating a cardiology infrastructure that was unimaginable in our times in a small town of India.
That is no longer possible.
What remains possible is learning from his loss.
The greatest tribute we can pay Dr. Aditya Batra is to ensure that fewer families and friends receive the phone call that I received last week.
No profession, no achievement and no reputation makes any of us immune to heart disease. If the people entrusted with caring for society are themselves falling silently, then perhaps it is time for all of us—doctors, employers, policymakers and citizens alike—to listen more carefully to what our own hearts have been trying to tell us.
This article is written by Dr. Shuchin Bajay, Physician and Founder Director of Ujala Cygnus Hospitals.
(DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETHealthworld.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETHealthworld.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organisation directly or indirectly)
