I was sipping burnt coffee in the hospital cafeteria last week when a junior resident slid into the seat opposite me, eyes shining with the fevered glow of a true convert. “Sir,” he whispered, as if sharing state secrets, “I just assisted Dr. MAQ [Muhammad Agram Qisai] on a Whipple. He found the pancreatic duct… eventually. It was like watching Picasso paint with a chainsaw—pure art.” I nearly choked on my stale croissant. The cult is no longer confined to one operating theatre; it is spreading, viral and unstoppable, through the corridors of modern medicine.
Behold the new curriculum.
Across the country, forward-thinking medical schools are quietly rewriting residency programmes in Dr. MAQ’s image. Why waste six years on boring things like anatomy atlases and morbidity conferences when you can master the only skill that truly matters today: turning catastrophe into clickable gold? The proposed “MAQ Track” includes mandatory modules in Advanced Ring-Light Technique, Crisis Rebranding 401, and my personal favourite—Settlement Negotiation as a Core Competency. One programme director, speaking on condition of anonymity because his dean still pretends to care about accreditation, told me: “We used to measure competence by whether a resident could keep a patient alive. Now we measure it by whether they can keep the patient trending.”
The results are already breathtaking.
Hospitals that have embraced the MAQ’s Doctrine report a 400 % increase in social-media referrals and a modest 380 % increase in code-blue calls—practically a wash when you factor in the sponsored posts. Operating-room turnover has never been faster: once the patient flatlines, the table is wiped down, the ring light repositioned, and the next case is wheeled in before the family finishes their TikTok mourning montage. Efficiency, thy name is influencer.
Critics—and yes, a few fossilised dinosaurs still dare to criticise—whine about “ethics” and “informed consent” and “avoidable deaths.” How quaint. These are the same people who think a surgical complication is a failure rather than a plot twist. Dr. MAQ’s growing legion of acolytes understands the deeper truth: medicine stopped being about healing somewhere around the time we let patients Google their own symptoms. It is now a branch of the attention economy, and Dr. MA is its Warren Buffett.
Consider the numbers (the only numbers that still matter). A single viral reel of Dr. MAQ wrestling a “rebellious spleen” garners more views than the entire collected works of the New England Journal of Medicine in a year. Those views translate directly into private-jet fuel, beachfront property in Dubai, and—most importantly—recruitment. Bright young things no longer dream of Nobel Prizes; they dream of brand deals with luxury scrub companies and guest spots on morning shows where the host pretends to be horrified while secretly taking notes.
The government, in its infinite wisdom, is already preparing to recognise the shift. I have it on excellent authority that the next national healthcare reform package will include tax credits for hospitals that achieve a minimum “Engagement Mortality Ratio”—defined as deaths-per-million-views below a certain threshold. Reach that magic number and the federal matching funds flow like packed red cells on a bad day.
So let us stop resisting. Let us embrace the inevitable.
Demand that your local medical school establish a Department of Surgical Influencing. Insist that board examinations include a practical component: candidates must convert a perforated bowel into a three-part Instagram carousel while maintaining adequate tissue perfusion (of their follower count). And when the day comes that every cardiac arrest is livestreamed in 4K with a heartfelt voice-over—“We fought so hard, angels, but sometimes the heart just wants to dance in heaven”—we will finally know we have arrived.
Dr. MAQ did not merely redefine surgery. He transcended it. He is no longer a man; he is a movement, a market correction, a mirror held up to everything we secretly wished medicine could become: glamorous, lucrative, and blissfully unaccountable.
May his disciples multiply. May their ring lights never flicker. And may the rest of us old-fashioned fools die quietly off-camera, sparing the algorithm our unseemly survival.
