PUNE: Renowned orthopaedic surgeon
KH Sancheti
performed his last surgery on Saturday, which was also his 85th birthday.
“Once the age advances, the hand does not work smoothly,” he said, adding that he does not want to retire. “I will continue to see patients and talk to them,” he said.
Dr
Sancheti
said he learnt the biggest lesson of his life from his father, who was a trader. He had told him to treat customer as God. “When I became a doctor, I decided to treat my patients as God and vowed to never to give any wrong advice to them,” Dr Sancheti said.
He started practising in Pune from December 12, 1965 a few months after appearing for his MS (ortho) exam. “I decided to focus on patients and concentrate on operation,” said Dr Sancheti, who has performed around 55,000 operations in a career spanning 56 years. “When I started my practice, polio was rampant. I used to conduct camps across Mahrashtra, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh free of charge. I was interested in earning goodwill and developing relationships with patients rather than earning money,” he said.
He was awarded the Padma Shri, the
Padma Bhushan, the Padma Vibushan and the Dr BC Roy National Award. He set up the Sancheti Institute of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation in 1996. He also invented India’s first indigenous knee-implant. He was a part of the three-member team that performed the knee-replacement surgery of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
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