In this week's Doctor Diaries entry, we feature Dr. Venkatraman Radhakrishnan's story which underlines the general distrust that patients and their families have on doctors, and how the former always think they know better.

Cancer patients are more prone to infections like dengue and typhoid due to their suppressed immunity. Infections in cancer patients can be more serious than normal individuals.

We were treating a patient with blood cancer. She was very sick and had to be admitted to the ICU. The patient's fever was not responding to powerful antibiotics. Bacteria cultures were sterile. The patient had low platelets and we were not sure if it was due to the chemotherapy or cancer or infection. There was an epidemic of dengue in the city during that period. Many patients were getting infected with dengue.

So it was natural to send the patient's sample to see if she was dengue positive. The results were negative for dengue. Unfortunately, the patient died due to sepsis and septic shock in the ICU. A huge mob had gathered outside the ICU. Suddenly people who were never seen with the patient turned up.

One person was very loud, rude, and arrogant. He barged into the ICU and started shouting, “the patient never had cancer, she was being treated for dengue”, I spoke to him and showed him all the reports and the consent forms. He refused to believe.

He said ‘what is the necessity of sending dengue test if the patient has cancer’, ‘you knew it was dengue and that's why you sent the test’, ‘this is how you fool the public, I know dengue and cancer are different diseases’.

I tried explaining to him that a cancer patient can also develop dengue, but it was of no use, more people joined him.

In the end, it was the patient's father who saved us. He told the mob to go away and that the hospital and doctors had provided the best possible care to the patient.

This story was originally published on Dr. Venkatraman Radhakrishnan's blog 'Medical Musings' on Quora and has been republished here without any edits.