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Category: COMMENTS
October 01, 2012
Pre-employment medical tests, considered to be a practice within the subspecialty of occupational medicine, are ordered by physicians on behalf of employers. Candidates for a job may be rejected if they are found to suffer from a condition that can be worsened by the job, or one that may put othe...
October 01, 2012
The migration of doctors from developing to developed countries is an ongoing phenomenon. There is scant information on the attitudes of medical students to the ethical aspects of this trend. This paper reports on a study of 50 first-year medical students and 52 interns in a college in Vellore ci...
October 01, 2012
The National Rural Health Mission has stated as one of its key mandates the mainstreaming of the Ayurveda, Yoga, aturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy (AYUSH) systems in order to help solve the human resource shortage in Indian healthcare. This has been planned at the primary level by providin...
October 01, 2012
Patient autonomy is affected by a number of factors, including severity of illness, socio-economic status and dependence. Many patients find that they are not treated with due consideration and compassion, and also have no control over their own care.
July 01, 2012
An examination of the intersection of legal and medical discourses, particularly in the realm of mental health legislation, provides a rich opportunity to clarify fundamental ethical conflicts. This essay studies one such legal discourse, the draft amendments to the Mental Health Act (1987), to d...
July 01, 2012
When I started writing essays in favour of wronged patients in the late 1960s, I was warned of this possibility. Criticisms of that section of the medical profession that hurt patients or ill-treated them or cheated them inevitably drew censure of my action. While there was never any dispute abou...
July 01, 2012
Debates in India on end-of-life care assumed a new life after the petition in the Supreme Court in the case of Aruna Ramchandra Shanbaug, calling for withdrawal of life-sustaining therapy from a patient in a persistent vegetative state. The Court's landmark decision has led the way for discussing...
April 01, 2012
On January 13 this year, the Group of Ministers on Bhopal (GoMB) decided that the Government of India (GoI) should not revise the figures of deaths and injury caused by the December 1984 Union Carbide disaster. The critical document in which this revision was considered is the curative petition f...
April 01, 2012
Hercule Poirot, the legendary detective, now retired, spent his time growing vegetable marrows. It was a typical day and Poirot was sipping his tisane, reading the day's paper. He glanced at the Obituaries column (as was his practice now with ripening age).
April 01, 2012
A psychiatric advance directive (PAD) is a document which outlines the patient's preference in her/his treatment. This is executed when the patient has capacity, so that these directions can guide treatment at a later date when s/he is unwell.