With DAP, PNP can’t take care of Enrile?

The recommendation of the Department of Medicine of the Philippine National Police General Hospital to move Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile to a better facility is based on its doctors’ admission that the hospital does not have the needed medical equipment in case the senator would require emergency care.

This “confession” tickles me because with billions of pesos from the Disbursement Acceleration Program, it seems the government was not able to buy modern medical equipment for the premier PNP hospital—equipment that most private hospitals already have.

The fact is, a well-equipped emergency room is all that Enrile needs. Provided specialists are on call 24/7. Most modern medical facilities are for diagnosis, not for treatment. Filipino specialists can easily attend to emergency cases just with their eyes, ears and knowledge of emergency medicine, even without CT scan or MRI, which are to come later after the emergency treatment.

Perhaps, Enrile should be in a nursing home, or a home for the aged. He appears sprightly, well-groomed and healthy on TV as he commutes between detention and the Sandiganbayan. If the fear is fluctuating high blood pressure, the most likely complication scenario is cerebral hemorrhage, heart attack or mild stroke.

Under any of this situation, he has still time to be rushed to the emergency room of any hospital for immediate care by the on-call specialist, and survive. Most, if not all homes for the aged, are populated by persons between 60 and 100 years old, some of whom are sick, sickly or in the pink of health.

The doctors at the Philippine National Police General Hospital are perhaps just listening to the tugging of Enrile’s lawyer rather than the pleading of their medical common sense.

I suspect Enrile would rather choose house arrest than transfer. This is the best option for the grand old man, guilty or not. At his age he should face his Creator at home, not in a modern emergency room of a hospital. Let’s give him house arrest.

—DR. AGUIDO A. MAGDADARO, MD, FPCP retired internist, [email protected]