The latest film from the stable of director Adam McKay is parodical and farcical, but also authentic and despondent, not unlike his previous venture with The Big Short (2015). But unlike the former, Don’t Look Up — the story of a people facing an advancing comet, a planet killer...

From a public interest perspective, the most important policy shift in the regulation of medicines in the 21st century is improved transparency. Until recently, the scientific evidence that companies provided to regulators to support approval of medicines for marketing was largely considered “con...

In the West, from the 1950s through to the 1990s, psychotropic drugs, like antidepressants, antipsychotics and benzodiazepines, were endorsed by medical, political and religious establishments, while Freud and social approaches to mental disorders were a badge of honour for the Liberal Left, bioe...

“All I could do was give her solace and companionship as best as I could, without breaking down myself.” This is what Dr Kavitha, a Medical Officer at Karunashraya, has to say remembering her patient Kamala. And this is what defines Karunashraya, which steps in for “care” when the doctors have no...

Art has become a central tool in bioethics discourses across the world and in challenging the ethics of discourse and extending our moral imagination about life and existence. In the last two decades, the Hindi film industry has seen a cavalcade of films that grapple with bioethical issues. From ...

"During fieldwork, I was often given friendly warnings, like 'you never know who anyone is in Kashmir,' a statement meant to warn me not to trust too easily, given the long-standing history of informers, spies and collaborators in Kashmir. Several times after I interviewed someone, I learned of t...

Writing a book on a subject like “patient’s rights” is challenging, as it can be perceived as threatening by healthcare providers, especially in the context of present-day privatisation and commercialisation of healthcare services. The relationship between healthcare providers and patients is a s...

Question: What do the major public-health crises of our time share in common? Answer: They are all expressions of a global economic order whose identity is unclear to us or whose name we are too scared to pronounce. Public health expert Nick Freudenberg’s new book deals with the nature of the p...

Rooting for Roona is a thought-provoking documentary on the unaddressed problem of congenital disorders and children who survive with severe disabilities in India. Released on Netflix, the documentary narrates the brief life of Roona from Jirania Khola village in Tripura. Roona is born with sever...

When I wrote my essay on Dr. Pernkopf and his atlas (1), I had referred in it to Dr. Sabine Hildebrandt’s papers in journals. I had no access then to her book on anatomical practices during the Third Reich. Since there is considerable additional information in the book, I am reviewing it here.

Sunil K Pandya