For years I've carried a skin problem that no one has been able to name. One dermatologist calls it eczema, another says psoriasis, a third settles on dermatitis. The rashes flare without warning, sometimes raw and red, and then they fade on their own. Nobody has told me why they come, and nobody has cured them. What I have collected instead is a drawer full of topical steroids, oral steroids, special soaps and moisturisers — and a slow, sinking realisation that I want to talk about honestly.

The same chemist's bill, a different miracle each time

There is a dermatologist I've trusted for the better part of five years. When I first went, she had a small clinic. Every visit ended the same way: a fresh prescription and a bill that never dipped below a few thousand rupees. This soap, that moisturiser, this cream. The doctor recommended it, so I bought it. The flare would settle, I'd stop going, and life moved on.

Last year I returned. The clinic had become a gleaming two-storey place with glass doors. The treatment, though, followed the old script — a new medicine each time, none of them addressing the root. On this visit she insisted on a moisturiser she described as very advanced cosmetology, something that would finally help. I paid around 1,300 rupees for it. Fifteen minutes after I applied it, the dryness pushed right back through.

That was the moment something in me broke a little. I had walked in with so much faith, and I walked out feeling handed another product rather than another step towards getting well. I haven't been back to any doctor since.

The question I can't unsee

I read body language for a living, and I know how trust is performed and how it's earned. So this experience sat heavily with me. We know medical representatives exist; we know companies court doctors. That isn't new. But there's a line between recommending and pushing — and an expensive product you keep prescribing without ever checking whether it works lands on the wrong side of it.

It wasn't only her. When I visited my native place in Odisha, my family sent me to a doctor people travel long distances to see. He prescribed the same kind of treatment, and said it plainly: steroids are simply how we work, nothing moves without them. I left feeling more disheartened, not less.

Here is what unsettles me. A non-medical person walks into a clinic with one belief — this human being will make me better. They are vulnerable precisely because they are trusting. And if a doctor, weighed down by gifts and arrangements from this company or that, quietly steers that trust towards a product rather than a cure, the oath they took becomes a formality.

Am I overthinking, or are you feeling it too?

I keep returning to one uncomfortable thought: maybe some doctors don't fully want us healed, because a healed patient doesn't come back. I say some, and I say it carefully — body language and lived experience reveal patterns, not certainties, and I have no wish to tar an entire profession with one frustrated brush. There are extraordinary, ethical doctors who would be hurt to read this.

But I also can't pretend I didn't feel what I felt. So I'm doing the thing I'd advise anyone to do when a private worry starts to feel like a delusion: I'm checking it against other people. Is this just me, building a story out of disappointment? Or have you sat in a clinic and slowly understood that the prescription was about someone's business, not your body?

I genuinely want to know. If your journey has looked anything like mine, please tell me. Sometimes the most healing thing isn't a new cream — it's discovering you were never imagining it.