The recent unsettling incident at Shastri Nagar Hospital in Dombivli, under the Kalyan-Dombivli Municipal Corporation (KDMC), serves as a stark reminder of the fragile state of India's healthcare environment. A local politician and his associates physically assaulted on-duty resident medical officers and nursing staff.
The confrontation began after doctors advised a heavily pregnant woman to seek medical attention at a larger, government-run hospital in Mumbai; the local hospital’s advanced facilities, particularly the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) beds required for an expected high-risk delivery, were already occupied by existing patients. Accordingly, the doctors made a responsible referral to ensure the safety of both mother and child.
What followed was absolutely uncalled for. Instead of addressing the institutional lack of infrastructure, the politician resorted to violence, leaving the medical staff deeply traumatised and leading to immediate resignations.
This extreme and unwarranted step was rightly met with widespread public outrage, political condemnation, and police arrests. A doctor cannot conjure advanced medical facilities out of thin air, yet they are treated as the physical punching bags for systemic failure.
However, incidents like this highlight an interesting social paradox. When the public discusses the deep problems within the Indian healthcare space—such as the commercialisation of hospitals, inflated medical bills, or unnecessary diagnostic tests—honest, hard-working doctors often step forward to aggressively defend the entire industry. Even when online criticism is general and explicitly aimed at institutional corruption, many medical professionals take it as a personal insult.
Why do professionals find it so difficult to look at their own industry objectively? Why do they feel an urge to defend an entire system, even when it contains bad actors who discredit their work? To understand this, we must examine the social and psychological forces that shape professional identity.
The Spectrum of Professional Identity
To understand why a doctor might feel attacked by a general social media post about hospital corruption, it helps to look at how different industries process external criticism.
At one end of the spectrum, consider a software engineer working in the Information Technology (IT) sector. If a major IT firm is exposed for a financial scam or data malpractice, an engineer working there does not feel a personal stain on their character. They might view it as bad corporate governance, worry about their shares, or update their resume to find a new job. For the corporate worker, employment is largely a transactional contract. Their job is what they do, not who they are.
However, some professions are far more public-facing and morally scrutinised than a corporate IT desk. Take my own background as a media professional—a business journalist, to be precise. The media industry is routinely accused of operating unprofessionally. The public frequently targets journalists and media companies with allegations of unethical conduct, biased reporting, wrongful coverage, and the spread of "fake news".
As someone who has worked in this space, I am acutely aware of these issues. I know that there are, and always will be, "bad apples" at both the institutional and professional levels of the media. Yet, whenever the public vented its frustration against the industry, I never took those accusations personally. I never felt an urgent need to step forward and blindly defend every media house or reporter. Instead, I acknowledged the systemic flaws while remaining anchored in my own reality: I knew that I was honest and truthful in my work, and I always operated as a responsible professional.
I understand that the medical profession operates on a very different psychological level. Sociologists use a term called "identity fusion" to describe a state where a person’s individual identity completely merges with their professional group. For an Indian doctor, this mixing begins very early. The journey involves clearing highly competitive entrance exams, surviving years of intense academic pressure, and enduring gruelling, sleepless residency shifts.
Because the entry cost to the profession is incredibly high, the job becomes a Master Status—the primary label by which a person defines themselves. When years of immense personal sacrifice are poured into a singular identity, any criticism levelled at that industry is rarely filtered with the objectivity of a journalist or the detachment of an IT worker. It feels like an immediate, personal invalidation of the individual’s entire life choices and moral worth.
The Illusion of Collective Guilt
When a citizen posts on social media about being overcharged by a private hospital, the target of their anger is institutional greed. However, through the lens of identity fusion, a doctor does not read the post as a critique of hospital administration. Instead, their brain processes it through a cognitive bias called “Personalised Generalisation”. They internalise the critique to mean, “People think all doctors are thieves”.
Because the honest practitioner knows they are working under exhausting conditions to save lives, this perceived accusation feels deeply offensive. Instead of agreeing that institutional corruption is a mutual enemy, they instinctively enter a defensive mode to protect their collective honour.
This reaction is further intensified by the unique moral expectations placed on healthcare. Society does not expect real estate developers or retail corporations to act out of pure altruism; they are understood to be profit-driven. Healthcare, however, is viewed through a moral lens. When the public witnesses the ugly, hyper-commercialised side of medical facilities, the emotional backlash is severe. Doctors feel this heavy moral scrutiny constantly, which makes them far more defensive than professionals in standard commercial industries.
The Siege Mentality and Defensive Exhaustion
We cannot evaluate a professional's defensive reaction on a community message board without looking at their real-world environment. According to studies on the medical fraternity, a vast majority of doctors in India report facing intense stress, fear of litigation, and verbal or physical abuse at their workplace.
When healthcare professionals operate in an environment where a lack of resources can lead to a flash mob outside their clinic or a politician assaulting them on camera, they develop what is known as a “Siege Mentality”. This is a collective psychological state where a group believes that the outside world is entirely hostile and actively out to get them.
In this state of high alert and emotional exhaustion, the brain’s ability to handle nuance diminishes. A casual, well-meaning observation shared in a school / college alumni WhatsApp group or on social media about the state of Indian healthcare is no longer seen as a topic for intellectual debate. It is treated as another incoming missile. The professional feels they are a soldier defending their fraternity from a public that does not understand their daily struggle.
Moving Forward: Separating Identity and Improving Dialogue
While the psychological reasons behind this defensiveness are clear, the habit of blindly defending an industry or a profession is ultimately counterproductive. If the honest members of a profession refuse to acknowledge structural flaws, they inadvertently shield the bad actors who ruin the industry's reputation.
The approach used in journalism—and many other fields—needs to be adopted across the board. Progress must be made on two fronts:
1. For the Professionals: De-linking Identity from the System
Professionals, particularly those in high-stakes fields like medicine, need to build a healthy psychological distance between their personal character and the system they work within. A critique of the Indian healthcare system is not a critique of every individual doctor's integrity.
It is entirely possible to look at an industry objectively and say: "Yes, institutional greed, inflated bills, and medical malpractice are serious issues that need strict regulation. As an honest professional, these practices hurt me and my patients the most." By separating personal honour from corporate or systemic failures, professionals can join the conversation as objective partners rather than defensive adversaries.
2. For the Public: Precise and Nuanced Communication
On the other side, the public and the media need to be fairer when they speak. Broad-brush comments like "all hospitals are just businesses" or "doctors only care about money" might be true for the majority. But blanket statements like these are deeply damaging to the morale of the few honest healthcare professionals who still routinely work until they drop from exhaustion.
When sharing complaints online, our language should be precise. We must direct our criticism towards institutional policies, a lack of government spending on infrastructure, and specific unethical practices, rather than attacking the entire medical community.
The ugly incident in Kalyan-Dombivli showed us exactly what happens when systemic frustrations turn into misplaced, violent attacks on individuals. The only way to prevent this deep divide is to create an environment where patients and professionals can talk to each other, rather than at each other. We must realise that a broken system harms both the person seeking care and the person trying to provide it.
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