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Category: Editorials
April 01, 2011
In April 2010, the government announced an enquiry into the conduct of a study on the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat. More than a year later, the committee's final report is yet to be made public. The committee's preliminary report records a number of ethical vi...
January 01, 2011
The Medical Council of India (MCI), in a rare act, suspended the licences of the president and secretary of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) for six months, on the grounds that they had performed an unethical act in endorsing products of PepsiCo and Dabur. The MCI’s action followed a one-pers...
January 01, 2011
It is well known that bioethics evolved in the West as a result of series of scandals and a public outcry over the misuse of authority and control by the medical profession. By comparison, in India, the medical profession has not faced such public scrutiny or censure. Modern medicine, in partic...
October 01, 2010
Gone are the heady days of the 1960s when we tramped around town on August 15 with a tricolour in hand and a song on our lips. By the 1990s, patriotism was passe and it was clearly "uncool" to become sentimental on Independence Day. After all, why waste a hard-earned holiday moping over imp...
October 01, 2010
The egregious verdict, delivered after 26 long years, in the Bhopal gas case is merely the foretold result of an unholy collaboration between the political class, the bureaucracy and the judiciary. The blatant manoeuvres that ensured that this kind of verdict would be delivered are a matter...
July 01, 2010
“The Medical Council of India is a statutory national agencyc charged with several responsibilities. Sadly, it is plagued by inefficiency, arbitrariness and lack of transparency. It has been functioning for some years as the fiefdom of one person, Ketan Desai. He has been re-elected president of ...
July 01, 2010
The reports of a racket in spurious and expired drugs operating in Tamil Nadu have thrown up several issues akin to the Indian Premier League. In the latter case, suddenly, after the one wrong tweet, skeletons tumbled out from nowhere and people who would have known about it, and who were probabl...
July 01, 2010
In early May 2010, a three-member bench of the Supreme Court of India, headed by the outgoing chief justice, delivered a pathbreaking judgment. It declared illegal, and a violation of human rights, the use of medical techniques such as narcoanalysis and various methods of “lie detection” (hereaft...
April 01, 2010
Gifts to doctors influence their prescribing patterns. Research has shown, quite unequivocally, that even a small gift, like a pen, can have an influence. The evidence on this is catalogued in detail on the website www.nofreelunch.org. The move of the Medical Council of India (MCI) to amend the c...
April 01, 2010
The recent decision of the Medical Council of India (MCI) to initiate the training of an exclusive cadre for the healthcare needs of rural areas has provoked intense debate. Groups as well as individual experts have raised several points while arguing on either side of the debate. This short comm...