Doctors, beware

The enormous strides that India has made in the past 15 years has led to a larger proportion of Indians being better informed and aware of their rights.

Increasingly, we are on the way to becoming a consumerist society where the consumer is no longer willing to be taken for a ride. Slowly but surely, we are losing that mai-baap mentality which kept us in feudal and colonial servitude for so long.

Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad’s announcement to this newspaper that he is considering a law to regulate the medical industry will, therefore, be welcome to millions.

Outside the government-run institutions and in spite of the high quality of medical services available, many private hospitals and clinics very easily take advantage of patients and their families. If regulated, this propensity to cheat may well be kept in check.

For instance, most of the skirting of the law when it comes to gender testing for embryos takes place at private clinics not averse to making a fast buck by  turning a blind eye to the law.

It is no one’s case that practising medicine is easy or that hospitals do not have a right to make money. But health and medicine also represent one of the highest principles of human civilisation and therefore must adhere to a stringent code.

Needless pathological tests, arbitrary charges for such tests, harassing patients who fall short of funds come under the territory of sharp practices. The recent embarrassments suffered by the Medical Council of India on corruption charges against its chief only emphasise the need for a clean up in medicine.

Of course, the other side of the coin for a consumerist society is the dictum, caveat emptor or let the buyer beware. But people must be able to make a fair choice between treatments and medicines and they should have access to full information and disclosure. That is the burden that the service provider has to bear in a consumerist society.

The information age and growing literacy levels have made us all more aware and the medical community has to keep up with the times. India has so far been relatively free of the sort of medical malpractice litigations which keep the medical community on its toes in other parts of the world.

But those days are not far away. The medical community, instead of resisting the ministry’s efforts, should in fact cooperate to ensure that quacks, cheats and sharp practitioners are weeded out and punished when caught. The Hippocratic Oath should at least extend to that.