The long
appointment.

Most specialities meet a patient at their worst moment. Endocrinology meets a child on an ordinary Tuesday and asks what the last five years have looked like.

I trained first in paediatrics, which teaches you that children are not small adults, and that their physiology, their doses and their fears are all their own. That was an MBBS and then an MD in paediatric medicine at R. G. Kar Medical College in Kolkata, the city I have come back to practise in.

A fellowship in paediatric endocrinology at Regency CDER in Kanpur followed, and then three years of DM at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, one of the few centres in India where this super-speciality is taught in real depth.

PGIMER is a referral hospital of last resort for much of northern India. The children who arrive there have usually been somewhere else first. That training gives you two things: familiarity with genuinely rare disease, and, just as valuable, the confidence to recognise when a worried family’s child is entirely well and simply needs someone to look properly and say so.

I now consult at Neotia Bhagirathi Woman and Child Care Centre in New Town, Kolkata, where I look after children and adolescents with growth concerns, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, thyroid disease, early and delayed puberty, obesity and metabolic disease, bone and calcium disorders, adrenal and pituitary conditions, newborn endocrine problems and endocrine emergencies.

A great deal of this work is longitudinal. I will meet some of these children when they are four and hand them over to an adult service at eighteen. That is not a burden of the job; it is the reason for doing it.