No Honour Among Doctors

Let me tell you the story of Dr Ade Dr Ade was a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon in his early forties who had built a quiet reputation in a Nigerian teaching hospital. He was not loud. Far from it; his was a gentle, quiet type of presence. He didn’t attend every boring association dinner. He simply […]

Let me tell you the story of Dr Ade

Dr Ade was a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon in his early forties who had built a quiet reputation in a Nigerian teaching hospital. He was not loud. Far from it; his was a gentle, quiet type of presence. He didn’t attend every boring association dinner. He simply worked, long hours, complex cases, slim margins for error. His patients came from far away because word had spread: this man does not lose people on the table unnecessarily.

 

Then the letters began.

First, an anonymous petition to the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria. Allegation: performing a procedure beyond his competence. No evidence, just a whisper. Then another complaint to the hospital’s ethical committee: “unprofessional conduct” which turned out to be a senior colleague accusing Dr Ade of “stealing” a wealthy patient who had simply requested a second opinion.

The colleague? A man who had not performed a successful bypass in two years. A man whose patients kept developing wound infections while Dr Ade’s walked out smiling.

The investigation dragged on for eight months. Dr Ade was suspended for six weeks. His referrals dried up, and patients began to avoid him. Once you hear “under investigation,” they assume you are guilty, even if you are a saint. By the time the council cleared him of all charges (lack of evidence, they said, but never “you were maliciously targeted”), his career had already been damaged. The other doctor? He is now head of department.

 

Kai Jama’a!

Let me be blunt. The greatest threat to the Nigerian doctor today is not poor equipment, not low salary, not even brain drain. It’s another Nigerian doctor.

We have turned the medical profession into a gladiatorial arena where the prize is not better patient outcomes but the quiet satisfaction of watching a colleague fall. If you’re doing well,  if your private clinic is expanding, if your name appears in the news for a successful surgery, if patients skip past older doctors to sit in your consulting room, you are not admired. You’re

Marked; and the weapon of choice? The Medical and Dental Council complaint form.

There is nothing wrong with legitimate whistleblowing, if a doctor truly endangers lives, report them. But what we see today is a different beast: weaponised ethics. A doctor who can’t compete on competence will not retrain or reflect. He’ll simply pick up his phone, dial a junior colleague or a nurse who owes him a favour, and say: “Find something, anything. A wrong prescription date, a missing signature, a patient who died last year. Let us shake his tree.”

And because our regulatory system is already overwhelmed, because the council often cannot distinguish between a genuine complaint and a petty vendetta without a prolonged investigation, the accused doctor suffers first and wins later if at all. By the time you are cleared, your reputation is in tatters.

Doctors remember; we swore an oath. Not to a political party, not to a social club, but to a principle; “I’ll keep my patients from harm and injustice.” That oath includes our colleagues. It says, implicitly, that we must not stand by while a brother or sister is torn apart by falsehoods. It demands that we correct each other privately, not destroy each other publicly out of spite.

But somewhere along the line, we forgot, or perhaps we never learned; we just mumbled the words during our attestation.

In the Nigerian medical community today, backbiting is almost a sport. Walk into any doctors’ lounge in a federal tertiary hospital and listen. The conversation will rarely be about a challenging case or a new research paper. It’ll be about who has Japa’ed, landed a political appointment, received a grant, got a sponsorship for a conference abroad, or who has too many patients in their private wing. Behind every story is the same unspoken hunger: “Why him and not me?”

I have seen consultants hide vital intraoperative findings from colleagues to make them look incompetent. I have seen senior registrars sabotage juniors by “forgetting” to sign their logbooks. I have seen doctors call a patient’s family to whisper that another doctor’s treatment plan is wrong, not because it’s wrong, but because they want the patient transferred to their own bed. Someone complained about a colleague: ‘When did he start that he will have not one, but two private hospitals?’

This is not medicine. This is pathological envy. This is war.

The cost of this nonsense is enormous. Young doctors are leaving Nigeria not just for higher pay but for a system where your merit is not a liability. Where you’re not punished for excellence. Where a complaint goes to a fair, fast, anonymous review that distinguishes malice from malpractice.

And for those who stay? They learn to hide. They learn not to share innovative techniques. They learn to treat every colleague as a potential informant. The spirit of collaboration, the very foundation of good medicine, is replaced by silence, suspicion, and survival.

We must ask ourselves a painful question: If we can’t trust each other, how can our patients trust us? If we’re willing to destroy a colleague’s livelihood over envy, what stops us from cutting corners in their care?

I’m not naive. I know jealousy exists in every profession. But medicine is different. We deal in life and death. When a doctor is falsely accused, the real victim is not the doctor, it’s the hundreds of patients who will now be treated by a scared, distracted, or demoralised physician. Or worse, patients who lose access to the best doctor because he has been run out of town.

So, let me make a suggestion: the Medical and Dental Council must start sanctioning false complainants. If an investigation finds no evidence and also finds that the complaint was filed with malicious intent, the complainant should face consequences: suspension, fines, or referral for professional misconduct themselves. Until we make false reporting as dangerous as the malpractice it pretends to fight, the backstabbing will continue.

And to my fellow doctors: if you know a colleague is being maliciously targeted, speak up. Don’t  stay quiet because “it’s not my fight.” Today it is Dr Ade. Tomorrow, it will be you.

Honour among doctors isn’t a nostalgic fantasy. It is the only thing standing between us and complete collapse. Right now, that honour is bleeding out on the floor, and we’re the ones holding the knife.