{"id":9445,"date":"2026-10-27T15:57:17","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T10:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medicosnext.com\/?p=9445"},"modified":"2026-10-27T15:57:22","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T10:12:22","slug":"the-serpent-that-never-really-existed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medicosnext.com\/?p=9445","title":{"rendered":"The Serpent That Never Really Existed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Dr. Nali Hada<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><em>She is a Medical Officer and Heart and Lung Program Coordinator at Chhetrapati Free Clinic Hospital, with a keen interest in Internal Medicine, Cardiology, and medical research. She is also a Reviewer for European Heart Journal \u2013 Case Reports, published by Oxford University Press. Her interests include cardiovascular health, neuroscience, evidence-based medicine, and scientific communication. Passionate about lifelong learning, she aims to promote curiosity, critical thinking, and evidence-based practice among healthcare professionals and medical students.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;Not every curse is mystical. Some are microscopic.&#8221; What I found threatening yet interesting was the fact that \u201cWomen residing in the Karnali Province barely introduces themselves by their real name\u201d. They rather seem to introduce themselves by their fear. &#8220;Doctor&#8230;\u00a0malai naag lageko jasto lagchha.&#8221;<br><br>I couldn\u2019t sense any panic and fear in her voice but could sense only certainty. In the rural Nepal, certainty often arrives way long before science does. For generations, illnesses without obvious explanations have been given names that the modern medicine never wrote.\u00a0Naag lageko. Boksi lageko,\u00a0Hawa lageko.\u00a0These are not merely superstitions; these are actually the cultural attempts to explain suffering when modern science remains invisible. Way long before laboratories, humans made up their own stories to survive uncertainty.<br><br>Likewise so had the ladies there. Weeks before entering the hospital, a lady had developed what seemed to be an ordinary sore throat, following which she had fever. Then the pain came in and did not just stay localized rather began to travel, it did migrate as if choosing a different joint every consecutive day. Knees one morning. Ankles the next. Wrists by evening. Gradually, the entire body became a map of wandering pain of satellites. Soon came breathlessness. The village had already reached its diagnosis. A serpent&#8217;s curse, aka NAAG LAGNU.<br><br>The rituals began. Incense curled into the evening air. Sacred chants echoed through the room. Holy water was sprinkled. Offerings were made. Faith gathered around her bedside with remarkable devotion. Hoping it would all go away, after all, DHAMI JHAKRI is still considered humanity\u2019s oldest medicine. Unfortunately, HOPE, FAITH, and BELIEF could not slow the inflammation quietly unfolding within her heart.<br><br>One fine afternoon, when she finally arrived at the outpatient department, she carried more than symptoms. She carried the weight of delayed answers. That\u2019s when medicine comes into play not just with investigations but with listening. As she narrated her story, the clues quietly assembled themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>An untreated sore throat.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Migratory polyarthritis.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Persistent fever.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Progressive shortness of breath.<br>When I auscultated her chest, I being clinically curious figured out there resided humble extension of a murmur which the rituals could not detect despite offering multiple innocent animals and huge sum of money to the priest.<br>The murmur not loud enough to announce itself yet not soft enough to ignore. Investigations merely confirmed what history had already whispered in medical terms Acute Rheumatic Fever\/ Rheumatic Heart Disease. No serpent had entered her body, it was rather a bacterium.<br><br>Weeks earlier, a seemingly insignificant infection caused by\u00a0a witch named Streptococcus pyogenes\u00a0had awakened her immune response. The witch misguided her body to begin attacking her own heart. Through molecular mimicry, antibodies that were meant to defend life had mistaken her own cardiac tissue as an enemy. The mitral valve became collaterally damaged in a war of the immune system never intended to wage.<br><br>Sometimes nature&#8217;s greatest cruelty is not infection. It is mistaken identity. As medical students, we had been memorizing the Jones Criteria. We underline &#8220;migratory polyarthritis.&#8221; We highlight &#8220;carditis.&#8221; We even answer examination questions for five marks.<br><br>But standing before this woman, I realized that diseases never arrive as bullet points. They arrive wrapped up in stories. Her diagnosis had not been delayed because she lacked intelligence. It had been delayed because the village and the culture there offered an explanation long before medicine became accessible. Science often asks, &#8220;What is the disease?&#8221; Humanity first asks, &#8220;Why is this happening to me?&#8221; The answers are rarely spoken in the same language.<br><br>It is tempting for us doctors to dismiss traditional beliefs with quiet arrogance. But arrogance has never cured a patient. Understanding has. People do not choose superstition because they reject science. They choose it because suffering demands an explanation, and explanations are easier to find than healthcare.<br><br>That realization changed something in me. Medicine is not a contest between faith and facts. Even though faith may calm a frightened mind. Science always heals an inflamed heart. The wisest physician learns where one ends and the other must begin.<br><br>Months later, I found myself reflecting not on her echocardiogram or laboratory reports, but on the invisible cost of delayed care. Rheumatic Heart Disease is among the few cardiovascular diseases whose first chapter can often be prevented by something as ordinary as timely treatment of a sore throat.<br><br>An inexpensive course of antibiotics could have prevented years of valvular damage. Few tragedies in medicine are as profound as those that were entirely preventable. We often imagine that modern medicine advances through artificial intelligence, robotic surgery, and genomic sequencing. Yet in many corners of our world, the greatest breakthrough remains something far simpler: Helping a patient recognize that not every invisible illness is a curse.<br><br>Sometimes, the serpent was never there. It was only a bacterium waiting for us to find out sooner. And perhaps that is the quiet responsibility of every physician not just merely diagnose the disease, but also to translate the fear into understanding, belief into knowledge, and uncertainty into hope. Because every murmur tells two stories. One belongs to the heart. The other belongs to the society in which that heart learned to suffer.<br><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dr. Nali Hada She is a Medical Officer and Heart and Lung Program Coordinator at Chhetrapati Free Clinic Hospital, with a keen interest in Internal Medicine, Cardiology, and medical research. She is also a Reviewer for European Heart Journal \u2013 Case Reports, published by Oxford University Press. Her interests include cardiovascular health, neuroscience, evidence-based medicine, &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":110,"featured_media":9450,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[95,39,107,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-disease","category-feature","category-flash-news","category-in-the-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/medicosnext.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Cobra.png?fit=900%2C600&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicosnext.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicosnext.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicosnext.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicosnext.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicosnext.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9445"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/medicosnext.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9451,"href":"https:\/\/medicosnext.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9445\/revisions\/9451"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicosnext.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicosnext.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicosnext.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicosnext.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}