By Manoj Pathak

Patna, May 7 (IANS): In today's age, when doctors are charging hefty fees for the treatment of patients, there is a team of doctors in Patna who provide free medical checkups and free medicines every Sunday to villagers.

A free health camp was organised by Dr Raman Kishore, a physician at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Patna.

Now, under his leadership, his team has so far provided free treatment to more than 10,000 patients. The other doctors in this team also work in AIIMS Patna.

Raman started this work about four years back.

He said that not a single Sunday has passed since then when they have not set up a camp in a village, adding that 89 health camps have been set up in an area of about 30 km around Patna.

During this, they have treated more than 10,000 patients free of cost.

Raman said that he spends 70 to 80 per cent of his salary on free treatment of people.

He told IANS that people in the rural areas of Bihar are generally not much aware about diseases.

Raman said: "I was doing an internship after completing my MBBS, when I saw that many paralysed patients were coming there," adding that if these patients would have been aware about high blood pressure in advance, they could have avoided paralysis.

Since then he started creating awareness about the disease among the people in the rural areas. He said that his team keeps in touch with every patient they treat in a village.

For this, he has also made an app, in which the complete history and contact numbers of the patients are kept. They interact with the patients from time to time and give proper advice to them about treatment.

He said that out of the patients who reach them in the rural areas, about 25 to 30 per cent are hypertensive, while 10 to 12 percent are diabetic, but most of them do not know that they are sick. They say that these diseases don't have any symptoms in the initial stage, so they don't know about them.

Raman said that he studied at Gaya Medical College and most of the people who reach here are from the rural areas.

"At that time, I decided to help such people."

He added that "In the beginning I used to organise camps in the villages alone, but now a team of many doctors has been formed."

He informed that Dr Sarita, Dr Ranjit Kumar, Dr Chandan and Dr Akanksha are specialists in different fields. Due to this, people get treatment for most of the diseases in one camp only.

Raman said that everyone is on duty from Monday to Saturday and medical camps are organised in the rural areas on Sundays.

When asked about future plans, he said that at present these free camps are being organised within a 30 km radius of Patna, but now there is a plan to expand them.

He said that after setting up 100 camps in Patna, camps would be set up in other far flung areas.