India's Doctors Resist Medical Quackery

Indian doctors have accused the government of seeking to “sanction quackery” by proposing to allow homeopaths and others trained in alternative remedies to practise conventional medicine after taking a bridging course.

Doctors at private hospitals held protests and wore black armbands in opposition to the proposal, part of a sweeping overhaul of medical governance.  The bill would allow people who dispense Siddha, Ayurvedic and other traditional Indian remedies to practise medicine after taking a course, the length of which is yet to be decided. A similar law already in place in Madhya Pradesh state licenses traditional healers to dispense and prescribe 72 medicines after taking classes for three months. Rules for rigorous testing of Ayurvedic products have also been relaxed or waived, despite the concerns of medical scientists who say there is insufficient evidence to recommend their use in clinical settings.

The Indian Medical Association has criticised the plan, saying it will “lead to an army of half-baked doctors in the country”, according to the association’s president, KK Aggarwal. “The government is giving sanction to quackery.”

SS Uttre, the president of the Maharashtra state medical association, said the proposal would dilute medical education and provide a “back-way entry into medicine”. He added: “We are going to oppose it tooth and nail.”

Although India has more than 400 medical schools producing tens of thousands of high-quality graduates annually, the country has about 12 doctors, nurses or midwives per 10,000 people – less than half the World Health Organization benchmark. 

Thousands of graduates each year prefer to take their skills to the US or UK, or are drawn to well-paid jobs in the burgeoning private health industries of big cities such as Delhi or Mumbai. As a result, research three years ago found more than 2,000 primary health centres around the country lacked even one doctor to treat patients, with shortages of surgeons and specialists even more acute.

Many Indians turn instead to traditional remedies such as Ayurveda – treatments prepared according to recipes from ancient Hindu texts – or to “quacks” who present themselves as doctors but lack any medical qualifications. About 57% of purported Indian doctors are thought to fall into the latter category.