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Category: Editorials
July 01, 2011
Two years ago in an editorial we discussed the importance of bringing the spotlight onto the functioning of ethics committees (ECs) in India. Since the first ethical guidelines for biomedical research were formulated by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in 1980 (and their subsequent v...
July 01, 2011
Ethics is now at the centre stage of medical education and calls to intensify its formal teaching in the curriculum are getting louder. In the past, ethics was often given short shrift in the Indian MBBS curriculum, and consigned to a few forgotten pages in textbooks of forensic medicine. These m...
April 01, 2011
On March 7, 2011, the Supreme Court of India (SCI) delivered a progressive judgement with far-reaching implications for end-of-life care and medical practice. The 110-page document written by Justice Markandey Katju was delivered by a two-judge division bench. It is available on the SCI website a...
April 01, 2011
Between February 13 and March 18, 2011, a total of 18 women lost their lives while admitted in Umaid Hospital and the MG Hospital, Jodhpur, for medical management of their pregnancies. The majority of these women were from villages and all were from weak socio-economic backgrou...
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 ...