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Doctors can spread diseases to patients if they are not careful!

Q: Do doctors spread diseases?

Krishna: Yes, doctors can spread diseases to patients if they are not careful.

Hospital acquired infections are a great problem that kill patients.

Sometime back I read an interesting news bit: Doctors are told to ditch “disease spreading” neckties (1)

Doctors should no longer wear ties on ward rounds, because they can spread disease, the BMA says in its new guidance on infections acquired in hospital.

When you go to the doctor’s office, you risk picking up germs and getting sick. Doctors’ offices, hospitals, and other health care settings have a high risk of exposure to bacteria and viruses like colds, the flu, and Covid-19.

Germs can spread through direct or indirect contact with health care workers or other patients. If someone who’s sick sneezes, coughs, or talks close to you, you may get sick too.

You can also pick up germs from touching magazines, doorknobs, elevator buttons, and medical equipment. If you touch a germ-infected surface and then touch your face, bacteria or viruses can enter your body through your nose, eyes, and mouth.

Sometime back I took my mother to a dentist. There, I observed an interesting thing. The doctors ‘re removing their shoes/boots while entering surgical wards and their cabins. They ‘re leaving them on a rack outside their rooms. But after removing their shoes in which they walked from outside, they were wearing shoes that 're stacked on the same racks! Won’t the dust/soil from their outside boots left on the racks contaminate the shoes they ‘re wearing inside their surgical wards?

If they are really concerned about contamination and infections, they should actually wash their feet after leaving their ‘outside boots’, and wear fresh shoes from a separate rack, not from the same rack.

As a microbiologist, I could find this mistake of theirs, because I could get a full picture of what could happen, but ordinary people think that ‘s okay and good. That ‘s just a half-hearted gesture which didn’t make any sense to me. Aren’t these doctors spreading germs? They are!

But I think most doctors know how diseases spread and take care of their patients.

But Doctors too get some diseases from patients and avoiding them completely is difficult. And they can pass on these diseases to their patients sometimes unknowingly. Doctors are human beings too.

Healthcare workers may be at higher risk of acquiring and spreading contact-transmissible and respiratory infections due to the nature of their work (2).