In the case a whopping 13 doctors, together with the Botswana Health Professions Council (BHPC) will defend their decision not to recognise Professor Bhagat as a cardiologist and to further "malign him" in the media.
It appears that the crunch of the matter lies in the legal and medical jargon comprising four simple English questions: What is a specialist physician? Is it the same thing as a general physician? And what is a cardiologist? The bid to unravel these questions promises to become a lesson in semantics, as it has become clear that Bhagat and the BHPC differ on the meaning. While on the one hand Bhagat maintains that he is a Specialist Physician, whose area of specialty is Cardiology, the BHPC says he is neither, rather, this organisation maintains, he is a general physician. It is on the use of General Physician and Specialist Physician that these parties differ. In the normal training of medicine, a student, through five years of training becomes what is called a General Practitioner (GP). To specialise, the GP will usually need another three years of training and to go beyond the first specialisation, a further three years.
