Indian doctors protest against plan to let ‘quacks’ practise medicine
Indian doctors have accused the government of seeking to “sanction quackery” by proposing to allow homeopaths and others trained in alternative remedies to practise conventional medicine after taking a bridging course.
Doctors at private hospitals held protests on Tuesday while their counterparts in public facilities wore black armbands in opposition to the proposal, part of a sweeping overhaul of medical governance.
Aimed at addressing a severe shortage of doctors, particularly in rural areas, the bill would allow people who dispense Siddha, Ayurvedic and other traditional Indian remedies to practise medicine after taking a course, the length of which is yet to be decided. A similar law already in place in Madhya Pradesh state licenses traditional healers to dispense and prescribe 72 medicines after taking classes for three months. The Indian Medical Association has criticised the plan, saying it will “lead to an army of half-baked doctors in the country”, according to the association’s president, KK Aggarwal.
“The government is giving sanction to quackery,” he said.
“If those doctors make mistakes and people pay with their lives, who is going to be held accountable?” SS Uttre, the president of the Maharashtra state medical association, said the proposal would dilute medical education and provide a “back-way entry into medicine”. He added: “We are going to oppose it tooth and nail.” Although India has more than 400 medical schools producing tens of thousands of high-quality graduates annually, the country has about 12 doctors, nurses or midwives per 10,000 people – less than half the World Health Organisation benchmark. Thousands of graduates each year prefer to take their skills to the US or UK, or are drawn to wellpaid jobs in the burgeoning private health industries of big cities such as Delhi or Mumbai.