"Sir, I want your permission to take patients from your unit for my dissertation."
She was a resident doctor working in another unit.
"What is the topic of your dissertation?" I asked.
"Identification of factors responsible for failure to respond to therapy of anemia in pregnancy" she said.
"What are you studying?" I asked.
"Mainly in therapy. Patients in other units take iron on full stomach. I want to use them as controls."
"OK" I said. "but my patients are instructed to take iron on empty stomach."
"I will take them in the study group" she said
Then a month later the resident doctors went on strike, and I had to go to that unit's antenatal clinic to see patients. I remembered what she had said, and wanted to see how their patients were managed.
I asked each patient I saw how she was taking her iron supplements. I did not find a single patient taking it on empty stomach. None of the prescriptions had instructions for taking oral iron. One patient examined by this same resident at the time of the previous visit was without any treatment for a month, being told to have her pregnancy diagnosed by ultrasonography first. She had been 16 weeks pregnant at that time. I informed the head of the said unit about the goings on.
"There are two things wrong" I said. "One is that the patients are not absorbing the iron they take. The other is the disturbing attitude of this resident, who claims that doctors in other units are not OK in the management of their patients, when she herself is deficient in both the treatment of her patients and her work on her dissertation."
"I will talk to her when she joins duty after the strike is called off" the head of that unit said.
