Way off mark, Mark

By Garth A. Rattray

I owe Mark Wignall an apology for my belated response to his recent fury-filled blitz. Someone told me about the assailing piece and I wrote the response right after I read it, but I had no intention of breaking my schedule for this sort of thing.

I also owe Mark Wignall an apology for not stating his name in my column in The Gleaner on March 31, 2014, titled, "Screen all student athletes". I didn't know that seeing his name was so important to him. I was focused on pointing out that doctors should not be perfunctorily blamed and the profession smeared for the sudden deaths of patients ... it's speculative, unfair, and inciting. And it was essential that I lobby for the need to screen our athletes (to prevent other sudden deaths).

As a rule, I do not read Mark Wignall, but the headlines about doctors caught my eye. So I also owe Mark an apology for having no idea who he is referring to when he whines about the omission of his name in my column, "He is not alone. Chupski has that problem, too. She simply calls me 'honey', but I would not recommend that to the family doctor."

Thank God no man ever has and no man ever will have any reason to call me 'honey'! Consequently, I never had the need to issue dissuasive statements. I wonder why Wignall felt compelled to do so. Hmmm!

In the article that sparked all of this, 'How much do you trust your doctor?', Mark Wignall tenuously insinuates that there is some sort of link between the sudden demise of a high-school student with a heart condition and a Medical Council of Jamaica's release that doctors need to keep their continuing medical education up to date. He poses a list of contrived questions and mischievously tries to put all doctors in a very bad light. Since Mark likes to see names in print, why isn't he brave enough to boldly name and blame individuals instead of broadly casting snide aspersions?

I am not getting involved in the contorted antecedence of this incredibly tragic case. Suffice it to say that Mark Wignall has totally missed my essential points. The veracity of my assertion still stands: whenever a young person dies suddenly from a heart condition, it is due to a fatal arrhythmia. This holds true for several cohorts, including elite athletes, patients who need operations for their Tetralogy of Fallot, and even in some of those who already had the operation. The sudden fatal arrhythmia point is what I used to introduce the serious need for Jamaica to screen our student athletes in order to save lives.

Mark Wignall laments that I made him out to be an evil buffoon and awarded him a PhD in idiocy (not my words ... they are his). He claims that I pulled 'medical rank' on him; but Mark Wignall pulled a 'rank' of another kind on me ... the malodorous kind. He went on to unleash a barrage of erroneous and presumptive statements in his usual, very predictable modus operandi.

Wrongly assumed

Mark very wrongly assumed that I knew the intricacies of the case that he used to encourage distrust of doctors. He convinced himself that I must have detailed knowledge of the matter because the doctor that he mentioned was my "UWI batchmate in 1981". For your information, Mark, doctors refer to the people who they graduate with as former classmates. Nurses refer to them as batchmates.

I only referred to that catastrophic case because Mark Wignall used it to insinuate that in general, doctors can't be trusted. In trying to lambaste me, Wignall employed his usual blunderbuss technique to pose a barrage of unfair, rapid-fire questions that have absolutely nothing to do with me; are totally irrelevant to the points that he keeps missing badly; and are unanswerable by any single individual.

His transparent, simplistic, and stale ploy of repeatedly using my name in the piece does not rattle me. I remain resolute that Mark has missed the mark totally. However, I'm willing to help him.

Don't fly off into tangential ranting. Try to focus, Mark. Focus. The points are:

1. It is unfair and dangerous to use one complicated case to encourage distrust of doctors.

2. We need to screen school athletes in order to reduce the incidence of sudden, fatal arrhythmias.

Garth A. Rattray is a medical doctor with a family practice. Email feeback to columns@gleanerjm.com andgarthrattray@gmail.com