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Category: Letters
July 02, 2023
The provision of government-funded public health services in India is grossly inadequate and 48.2% of “total health expenditure” for India is paid “out of pocket” [1]. When the total health expenditure in a household exceeds 10% of the annual income, it is considered catastrophic health expenditu...
January 10, 2023
The combined discipline of Yoga & Naturopathy (Y&N) constitutes one of the official indigenous medical systems under the Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa-Rigpa, and Homoeopathy (AYUSH), Government of India (GoI). The GoI has recently regulated all the systems under AY...
January 10, 2023
The duration of the pandemic over the last two years has witnessed the steering of multiple technological interventions by governments. These interventions — ranging from contact tracing applications to vaccine certificates — have been developed in the specific context of the pandemic, and were m...
January 10, 2023
I would like to bring to the notice of academia and the public the plight of medical teachers (unjustly called “non-medical teachers”) with MSc (Faculty of Medicine) and PhD (Faculty of Medicine) qualifications, who are being systematically excluded from teaching posts by the erstwhile Medical Co...
July 02, 2023
Ayurveda is based largely upon two classics — Charaka-Samhita, representing the school of medicine, and Sushruta-Samhita representing that of surgery. These two texts mark the historic switch in the Indian medical tradition, from faith-based therapeutics to its reason-based variant [1]. The Chara...
April 30, 2023
S Srinivasan in his article “The vaccine mandates judgment: Some reflections”, in this journal, analyses a judgment of the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India in summer this year [1]. Therein, he underscores significant points of interest, the logic behind them, a few points of contention, their scien...
July 02, 2023
As medicine becomes ever more technologically advanced, “human skills” are becoming increasingly important. Medical ethics or bioethics and medical humanities may have been formally introduced into the curriculum about the same time around the 1970s in certain developed nations. However, in many ...
July 02, 2023
Scientific writing and publishing are significant for an early-career researcher (ECR). For entry into doctoral studies, new jobs, or promotion, publications are among the essential requisites any selection committee will look for. Unlike interpersonal skills such as team building or communicatio...
July 02, 2023
Bioethics originated in the 1970s and has now been around for half a century. During that half-century, brilliant achievements have been made, especially in the West. Basic bioethics theories have been developed that have proved useful in solving many bioethical issues including policies. Moreove...
April 30, 2023
I have been practising medicine in an under-served rural setting since 1976, and have published around 109 papers in PubMed-indexed journals — including The Lancet, BMJ, NEJM and several tropical medicine journals — on scorpion and snakebite cases causing acute life-threatening conditions. I have...