Wisdom Bank - Dr Dhiren Parikh: The Doctor Who Chose His Principles, Wherever They Took Him

There are some people whose lives make sense only when you look backwards.

One decision leads to another. A value learned in childhood quietly appears again decades later. A difficult choice that seems inconvenient at the time eventually becomes part of the person you become.

Dr Dhiren Parikh's story is like that.

He decided he wanted to become a doctor while he was still in school. He went on to train in Ahmedabad, practise in India, work in Saudi Arabia and spend 12 years in Kenya. He built a long career as a physician, worked alongside cardiologists and a neurophysician, raised a family and eventually changed the way he worked after turning 60.

But the thread running through all of it is much simpler.

He wanted to practise medicine according to his conscience.

And there were times when doing that meant making choices that were not necessarily the easiest ones.

To understand why, you have to start with the boy he was.

The boy who had already decided

By Standard 10, Dr Parikh knew he wanted to become a doctor.

He had also decided that he wanted to be a physician rather than a surgeon. What attracted him was the thinking involved. A physician, he felt, had to approach every patient differently, work through possible diagnoses and decide on the right treatment for that particular person.

That way of thinking suited him.

Perhaps so did the discipline he had developed as a child.

His father worked for the State Bank of India, and every three years the family moved. Ahmedabad to Baroda, Baroda to a smaller village, and then elsewhere. Before Standard 10, Dr Parikh had changed schools around five to seven times.

For a child, that meant repeatedly leaving friends and familiar surroundings and starting again.

The timing could be difficult too. His father would sometimes be transferred in January, just a few months before examinations. Dr Parikh would have to settle into a new school and prepare at the same time.

Yet he consistently did well, usually standing first or second in his class.

There was cricket as well, so his childhood was not all books and examinations. But there was a strong expectation at home that he should take his studies seriously.

Once, after he came third or fourth in his class, his father told him to sleep outside the home.

He understood the message.

He needed to work harder.

By Standard 10, the transfers stopped. He remained in Ahmedabad through his higher studies and postgraduate education, and the decision he had made as a boy became a profession.

Then medicine gave him another kind of education.

The lessons that followed him

At V.S. Hospital in Ahmedabad, where Dr Parikh completed his MBBS and MD, he had a teacher who left a lasting impression on him.

The teacher was sincere with patients and punctual.

Those qualities stayed with him.

Even years later, Dr Parikh would describe punctuality in a way that revealed how seriously he took it. If he told a patient to come at 9:00, he would make sure he was there at 8:55.

It was not about making a show of being disciplined.

It was simply about doing what he had said he would do.

The same straightforwardness shaped the way he thought about patients.

He believed they should be told the truth about their condition. If someone had an infection, he would explain it. If they had suffered a heart attack, he would tell them that too, along with the possible complications and what needed to be done.

For him, medicine was not about frightening people into decisions.

It was about helping them understand what was actually happening.

He says that mindset came from his family.

By the time he began practising, those lessons were already deeply rooted.

When principles have a price

After completing his MD, Dr Parikh began practising in Ahmedabad.

He wanted to follow what he considered ethical medical practice. He did not want to take money from laboratories, radiologists or general practitioners, and he did not want financial incentives influencing his decisions for patients.

There was a consequence.

He was not earning as much as he could have.

So he went to Saudi Arabia for two years, where he earned more, before returning to Ahmedabad and practising for another three years.

Eventually, he moved to Kenya.

He would spend 12 years there.

It was a significant chapter of his career, but the question that mattered most had not changed: how do you practise medicine in the way you believe is right?

In Kenya, he would have to answer that question in a much more direct way.

The day the hospital asked for more

After joining a hospital in Kenya, Dr Parikh was asked to admit more patients.

He understood the request, but he did not agree with it.

For him, admission had to be based on medical need. If someone was seriously ill, they should be admitted. If they could be treated as an outpatient, that was what should happen.

So he told them he had come to Kenya to practise ethically. He would not admit patients simply because the hospital wanted more admissions.

That was his answer.

And then he went back to work.

What happened afterwards is what makes the story particularly interesting.

Patients continued to come to him, and their numbers grew because of his knowledge and sincerity. If he saw 50 patients, perhaps 10 genuinely needed to be admitted because they were seriously ill.

Those 10 were admitted.

The others were treated as outpatients.

There was no need for another argument.

The way he practised had already answered the question.

The truth belongs to the patient

That same principle extended into the consultation room.

Dr Parikh believes a patient deserves an honest explanation of what is happening to them.

That sounds obvious until you consider how vulnerable a patient can be. They are sitting across from someone who has the knowledge they do not have. They are trying to understand whether they are seriously ill, what could happen next and what they need to do.

In that moment, the doctor's words carry enormous weight.

Dr Parikh's approach was to explain the facts without adding unnecessary fear. He did not want to tell a patient that their condition was more serious than it was simply to push them towards admission, angiography, bypass surgery or another intervention.

He wanted the treatment to follow the diagnosis, not the other way around.

And when asked where that approach came from, he did not credit one defining moment in his medical career.

He went back to his family.

That is where he says it began.

A steady life, with one beautiful surprise

There is something else striking about the way Dr Parikh describes his journey.

He does not talk about his life as a series of dramatic ups and downs. After his MD, he practised in Ahmedabad, went to Saudi Arabia, returned to Ahmedabad and eventually moved to Kenya, where his income began to improve.

He describes it as steady.

Perhaps that is why one of the sweetest stories in his life fits so naturally into the middle of the professional journey.

He was in Standard 9 when he fell in love with a girl who lived next door.

Then his family moved, and they lost touch.

Four or five years later, they met again.

He proposed.

She was ready too.

Today, she is his wife.

His friends remembered the girl from those school days. When he told them he was marrying her, they knew exactly who he meant.

That girl.

After all the changes in schools, cities, countries and careers, there was something wonderfully constant about that story.

Some things, it seems, do not need to be complicated.

A different kind of retirement

After decades of full-time work, Dr Parikh reached 60.

By then, both his daughters were married and settled. He had already decided that he would not continue working full-time after turning 60.

For years, his routine had been demanding. In Kenya, he had worked 9 to 5 and handled emergencies. After returning, he worked with a cardiac surgeon as a consultant physician, again with a full-time schedule and emergencies.

Now he wanted a different pace.

But he did not want to stop helping patients.

So he moved into what he describes as a kind of pre-retirement phase.

He goes to one trust hospital in the morning for two or three hours and another in the evening, usually from five to seven. He sees patients from poorer and lower-middle-class backgrounds and describes what he is doing simply as serving people.

There is no longer a career to build.

No professional ladder to climb.

Just patients who need to be seen.

It is a quiet final chapter to a long medical career, but it also brings his story back to where it began.

The work still comes down to the person sitting in front of him.

What would he tell his younger self?

After everything he has seen, experienced and built, what would Dr Parikh tell the young man he once was?

His answer is remarkably close to the principles that have shaped his life.

Be sincere. Be ethical. Be truthful to yourself and your patients.

He teaches his daughters the same thing.

Perhaps that is where his story has something useful to say to anyone, whether or not they work in medicine.

You will not always control the circumstances around you. Dr Parikh certainly did not. His childhood involved repeated moves. His career took him across countries. His commitment to ethical practice affected his earnings. He encountered professional pressure and had to decide how he would respond to it.

But throughout the changes, he could control what kind of professional and person he wanted to be.

That choice appeared in different forms over the years.

Sometimes it meant leaving.

Sometimes it meant saying no.

Sometimes it meant telling a patient something they needed to hear rather than something that might make a decision easier.

And sometimes it was simply showing up when you said you would.

What a life can teach us

That is perhaps what makes Dr Parikh's journey quietly powerful.

Not perfection. Not a life without difficult choices.

A life in which the difficult choices did not change the person making them.

He did not build his life around one spectacular decision. He built it through ordinary choices made consistently, until those choices became part of who he was.

And now, after more than 60 years of life and decades of medicine, he is still doing what he decided to do as a boy.

He is still a physician.

He still thinks through the problem in front of him.

He still tells his patients what he believes to be true.

He still makes time for people who need his help.

And he still believes that if you give someone your word, you should keep it.

There is one small detail from his story that brings all of this together.

If Dr Parikh tells a patient to come at 9:00, he arrives at 8:55.

Five minutes early.

Perhaps that is all the explanation his life needs.

A promise kept.

A patient treated according to need.

A difficult choice made without abandoning a principle.

A career that eventually became a way of serving people.

Five minutes may not seem like much.

But repeated over a lifetime, small choices become character.

And character, quietly built over years, becomes a life.