Shiban is the chairman of a biotechnology company in India and a practicing gastroenterologist in the USA. He travels between these two spaces frequently but lives in them simultaneously. He has been a passionate theater worker, reluctant army officer, ambitious entrepreneur, successful CEO and an active NGO volunteer. Still, he is does not know what he wants to be when he grows up; but he wants his epitaph to be "He tried." Email: [email protected]
by Shiban Ganju An update and gratitude is overdue to the readers and editors of 3QD who supported the NGO, ‘Save a Mother’ in its infancy. Years have passed. So, what’s new? Nothing seems to have changed in ten years since I visited this village – a dusty swathe of land, home to over eleven…
by Shiban Ganju Early in the morning, my cell phone rang. I looked at the screen. It was a call from India; Anoop was on the other end. “This training will not do well. The women don’t seem enthusiastic.” He was in Uttar Pradesh, in a small village – Mijwan, the birth place of progressive…
by Shiban Ganju I wish you all a happy new year and hope it starts on a lighter note; mine did. After a year of worrying about the health reform – that wasn’t, and economic meltdown – that was, a phone call from brother in law (BIL) made me ruminate about sexually dysfunctional people. They…
by Shiban Ganju Health care begets health; the two are inseparable. Experience of developed countries shows that disease is recession proof while national income is not; demand grows inexorably while funding shrinks. When the resources lag to fulfill the minimum need, health becomes a mere dream. People of the world are unhappy with their national…
by Shiban Ganju We had assembled outside Lucknow to train ‘master trainers’. They had travelled from their villages, one to two hundred miles away, for a six day education in health care. Women outnumbered men in this group of thirty five. We believed, on their return, they would become health trainers in their native villages.…
by Shiban Ganju One formula to cut the cost of health care: stay healthy until you die. Unfortunately for the payers of health care, disease intervenes between health and death. That costs money. And the more chronic the disease, the more money it gobbles up. Prevention and management of chronic disease are two important planks…
by Shiban Ganju We spent approximately $115.9 billion to buy alcohol in the USA in 2003 and spent billons more to treat its ravaging effects on our bodies. We are not alone. All people – Asian, European, American, and African – enjoy and suffer almost equally. No society is exempt; rich spend discretionary income while…
by Shiban Ganju Jack arrived in the hospital a few minutes after midnight. Next morning he was dead. Death visits a hospital in sobs, shrieks or stoic silence. It stumbles with stroke, burns with feverish sepsis, crashes in with a fractured torso, stuns a teenager with drug overdose, rams the chest with a heart attack,…
The highway of life displays warning axioms, which my brother in law (BIL) missed or just ignored. BIL, the unemployed-but-rich hedge fund manager, laments that he should have never studied finance, which initiated him to a life of greed and excess. He has just realized the truth in the fourth axiom of life: whatever you…
By Shiban Ganju Her mouth stretched with a condescending smile and her face reflected scorn. “You’ve heard about some of these pet projects, they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research…
Human innards are noisy: thud of heart valves, hiss of lungs, swish of blood flow, gurgle of intestines; and in disease: the thud muffles into murmur, hiss becomes crackle, swish sharpens to whistle and gurgle falls silent. For about two centuries, medical practitioners have evolved an art to discern these sounds with the help of…
My brother in law (BIL) has ‘flu’: his dry throat and raspy cough bother him, but it his mucus laden stuffy nose that is the cause of his misery. He cannot smell and food has lost its flavor. If I were sentimental about food like BIL, I would sympathize; instead, I congratulate him, “Celebrate your…
The US annual health care expenditure is riding a nonstop escalator. The current spending of over two trillion dollars will reach an unsustainable four trillion dollars or 20% of the GDP in 2017. Yet, an estimated 47 million Americans had no insurance for a whole year in 2006 and 89.5 million people under the age…
My brother in law (BIL) has joined the jobless – the vortex of sub-prime debacle has sunk the hedge fund he managed. But please don’t pity him: he is without a job but not without money. Unlike a side-street plebeian, this Wall Street prince stays rich even when unemployed. BIL – though ailing from derivatives…
Shiban Ganju My pager beeped while I was standing in line in Starbucks. I checked the message – it was the telephone number of the ICU. I ordered my coffee and stepped aside to call. The nurse informed me, that I was asked to consult on a 33-year-old patient who had been admitted the night…
by Shiban Ganju Dedicated to Jenny Mah, a 3QD reader, who blogged the following comment in my earlier post: “Would you consider doing one on other forms of “detox” such as “cleansing” diets and, the latest to hit my city – ionic footbaths!” —————————————– I travel for my work; I fly forward across continents and…
by Shiban Ganju Super bugs excel in defying therapy just like super star Britney. Though antibiotic resistant bugs or ‘super bugs’ thrived before the super stars, yet unlike them they lay unnoticed – that is, till recently. Microbes inhabited this planet long before humans. They were already experts in the game of ‘natural selection’ –…
by Shiban Ganju This world has two kinds of people: those who flip from one diet to the other without shedding a pound and those who reach the same goal without trying. I met both of them on last Sunday: my brother in law (BIL), the non-dieting-hedge-fund-manager and his friend, a serial-dieter-hedge-fund-lawyer (HFL). Yes, she…
My brother in law (BIL) needs just enough sugar to sweeten his three cups of coffee a day. Beyond that he can do away with sugar. But BIL, the hedge fund manager, has always chewed candy to relieve the woes of wealth. And lately, with gyrating Wall Street and the stress of possibly losing it…
I buttoned my white coat, adjusted the stethoscope around my neck, opened the door and entered the examination room. I hadn’t seen Sally for a few years. On this day, what I remembered of her was: a high-strung person with recalcitrant belly pains, which I had not been able to palliate, in spite of all…