Raghuraman Column | Global Prehistoric Surgery To Medical Luxury Safar

N. Raghuraman, Management Guru

Recently, due to severe toothache, I was afraid of going to the dentist, because he advised me to extract the tooth. But ultimately I had to go, because they had assured of minimal pain. He jokingly said, ‘My facility may not be like Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, but I can assure you that it will not be as difficult as the experience of Neanderthal humans suffering from toothache 59 thousand years ago.’ These words of his made me seriously think about why he chose these two completely different things for comparison.

Cedars-Sinai is the same very famous hospital where Bollywood actor Shahrukh Khan was treated after a minor accident during the shooting of 2023. It is also a favorite medical destination of Hollywood’s top stars and the world’s billionaires. There is no official price list, but according to the fee details published around 2019-20, the price of heart transplant there was $ 3.3 million i.e. about Rs 30 crore.

However, the procedure that I went through to remove one tooth would not cost more than 800 dollars i.e. 77 thousand rupees. But I wondered why this place is so famous? Actually, there the patients are given a curated lifestyle experience. There is also a secret entrance at the back, so that these very famous personalities can avoid the paparazzi cameras while entering.

Online searches revealed that the place is filled with fine art, music, ambient lighting and beautiful architectural objects brought from different parts of the world, so that the patient feels comfortable and feels like he is recovering. There is not a single conventional staircase that the patient has to climb.

There are premium Italian beds costing around Rs 3 lakh. If you are extremely rich and don’t like anything, there is an in-house design and architecture team of more than 75 people who can modify everything for you.

The reception area is white and soothing to the eyes, like a high-end boutique hotel lobby. Upstairs there is a waiting room, which is like a private jet departure lounge. There are branded sofa sets in the consulting room, luxury Aesop hand wash worth Rs 4400 to Rs 7400 and countless such things. And finally, as they claim, there are world class medical professionals.

Nevertheless, complex surgeries were performed even in the ancient Neanderthal era, 59 thousand years ago. Recently, an important study on an ancient tooth found in a cave in Siberia has revealed indications of deliberate dental surgery. Perhaps a small stone tool was used to remove tooth decay and provide relief from pain.

Our extinct close relatives performed such complex and invasive dental procedures and had cognitive abilities such as deliberate medical strategies and precise manual skills. This challenges the traditional belief that only we Homo sapiens could do such complex things.

The study was published by a team of Russian scientists in the open-access journal ‘PLOS One’ on May 13 this year. Remember that the human mouth is extremely difficult to work with. Researchers believe that the person performing the surgery at that time must have had excellent skill, immense patience and a reliable assistant who could keep the patient’s head stable, because there was no local anesthesia at that time.

The bottom line is that If you keep yourself busy in learning something new about your disease, then you pay less attention to the pain. Because the mind feels proud when it learns that it has known something new, which was not known before.

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