Medicine is dead. But the corpse is still valuable for those who gain from it.

 

News Item: Thousands of medical seats are going vacant: What’s really wrong with MBBS admissions in India?

"Despite a 39% rise in MBBS seats in India from 2020–21 to 2024–25, over 2,800 seats remain vacant. Data tabled in the Lok Sabha reveals gaps linked to high private fees, complex counselling, and low uptake in newer colleges. While infrastructure expands, persistent underutilisation raises concerns about accessibility, affordability, and systemic inefficiencies in medical admissions."

My comments;

The medical profession is dying. Its practitioners have become robots. Those who are unable to cope are moving on to other healing modalities. This is a global trend. May their tribe increase. The suffering population of the world desperately need healing.

Medicine is not a routine career option that one can seek entry into after completing a course. You need qualities to become a genuine healer. The medical curriculum, as expressed by many a distinguished passout is a great hindrance. You are supposed to rote truckloads of information that you cannot contradict. About 60 to 70% of it you may never need as you are dubbed a practitioner, not a doctor; obeying orders and following protocols.

This prompts the question, what kind of education is this? Divorced from reality it is a burden one has to carry for life unless you have the courage to break away.

The medical curriculum boils down to a bunch of protocols. You have to follow them, wrong or right, regardless of consequences till decades later when the  wrong is finally corrected, if at all. If you employ your own intelligence you can be persecuted.

As the passouts have doubts that may not be clarified they are not in a position to address the anxious queries of the people because their education does not prepare them for that. Inspite of having the best of intentions the practitioners end up snapping at those who question the practices.

Yes they are doctors and they are backed by authority but the consequences of their actions are always borne by the person they seek to silence. Therefore the patient is entitled to receive the answers to his own satisfaction. He deserves the choice that is his right. He has the right to accountability and responsibility and redressal when things go wrong. He must get what is genuinely right for him. He deserves more than immediate disposal as a registered entity, an assigned number to be dealt with in this digital age.

The goal of medical education is about ensuring whole and healthy people. Why did it become disease oriented? When is it going to make health and cures a core subject again? There is no denying that as far as health and wellbeing is concerned, the present medical education is a misguided and unmitigated disaster.

The best of doctors have narrated their frustration with medical education;

• The basic premises considered settled science do not stand up to scrutiny
• Adverse effects are inevitable but the full range is always missing from medical textbooks. It is as if they do not exist. Everything is assumed to be generally safe
• How to identify and treat the adverse effects is also therefore not clear
• The most important aspects of health like nutrition, lifestyle and exercise, sanitation and hygiene, mental attitudes etc are sorely missing making the education system a joke
• Medical education is entirely shaped by the pharmaceutical industry that is absolutely in charge and it is not even remotely interested in health
• The education revolves around pharmaceutical interventions. It is designed to sell drugs, surgery, and products
• Interventions are one size fit all without considering gender, size and even age differentiation
• Education leads to a top down approach where the practitioner rules over the patients. It is a grossly unequal relationship
• The patients have no say in a system that is supposed to address their problems and this is currently irritating them to an extent where there is global rebellion

It is not possible to emerge as a doctor after undergoing such a brand of education. Frustrated, the best of doctors are abandoning the system as they realize that it is something vastly different from why they signed up to become a doctor.

The ones who are still sticking with it are doing so with the full knowledge that they are tools in the hands of the pharmaceutical industry.

Recently we had an article lamenting that there is no committee to financially regulate the medical institutions. It is a free for all making medicine a rudderless boat. To that we may add, who is looking after the other crucial aspects? Outcomes, prescription audits, patient feedback, adverse effect monitoring and redressal, system correction, much needed reforms. If there is no oversight (medical research and journals are revealed to be pure pharma propaganda by their editors themselves) what kind of medicine are we practicing?

What kind of medicine capitalizes and thrives due to its failures? Epidemics of disease and disabilities consequent to the "treatment" are certainly not success stories! Why not reflect on this? Why have diseases and complications as an inevitable outcome of treatment? How does this not trouble the practitioners? How do they adjust to this scenario?

Medicine is aggrandized by complicating things and introducing expert speak. Those medically educated are thrilled with the jargon and spouting them makes them feel important. Disease names are exciting and so are the procedures to manage them. They also get fancy degrees. These keep the practitioners occupied.

The patients and their discomfiture and complaints spoil the fun and have the potential to break the illusion. They are best ignored or massaged through manipulation of data. After all of the rigmarole there has to be some kind of success. Statistics provide that relief. Patients become data; dots, and lines in a graph. The graph becomes important. It becomes the weapon to silence all criticism.

The easiest job on the planet (keeping people healthy) has become the most convoluted. We don't need doctors and hospitals. We need knowledge about health, inputs that facilitate health, and an enabling environment. The body is designed to do the rest. That body instead is under a kind of attack it never imagined it would face. It is no longer able to cope.

Medical reforms is no longer about tweaking the system but about thoroughly dismantling it. This is the verdict of doctors all over the world. Either it heals or it goes. There is no middle path. The business empire must collapse for healing to emerge. Looting, poisoning, burning, cutting, and slashing are quackery masquerading as science.

Who is medicine serving? The doctors are suffering the most; 75% suffer from mental anguish and are becoming addicts. Their family members are suffering. Their children are suffering. Life is hell for those who have realized the futility of it all.

True happiness can only come from ensuring health and cures. A survey has revealed doctors don't want their children to enter the profession. Is that not reason enough to call for reforms?

Patients enter chambers of doom and after dealing with a myriad of tests emerge with files full of test results and prescriptions they have no idea about and cannot decipher. It is forbidden to expect cures and a return to health for that is deemed quackery. The entire thing is a back breaking exercise for both the groups.

The merchants who have designed the system and are in charge are laughing their way to the bank. They are always hungry for more. More pain, more suffering leads to more business and more profits.

Something has to give. This cannot continue. The worst fear of many is being hospitalized and being at the mercy of the system. They know nobody will listen to them and their opinion will be regarded as violence against the system. The fragile bodies of those suffering can no longer tolerate the treatment that will be blindly administered as safe and effective. Those suffering have no patience to accommodate more pain.

Ironically, during Covid times, it was the doctors who refused to be hospitalized as they knew what it was all about. We have lost two very caring doctors from our groups who were forcibly hospitalized against their wishes.

There are tens of thousands who share this fear. During the health surveys in rural areas I always ask the subjects what kind of end of life care they would prefer. In unison they say they would like to be at home surrounded by their own.

People hunger after human touch. Something that is purposefully missing in the medical world. The practitioners are programmed to be objective and dissociate themselves from the pain and anguish of the suffering. Doctors have written books about how this goes against the basic tenets of medicine. Doctors facing terminal illness have depicted their inner turmoil that have no medical relevance.

When will medicine listen to the people and fulfill their aspirations? When will health and cures become the focus? When will the extremely simple subject of health be once again taught in our medical institutions? When will the patient become a human subject rather than a machine to be fixed?

Business is good. Torturing people to ensure the growth of a business empire is perhaps not good.

But then I am a naive person who is not satisfied by the scientific explanations that mesmerize others. I go by what I see and observe. I don't get fooled by jargon and fake promises.

Link to the news item:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/thousands-of-medical-seats-are-going-vacant-whats-really-wrong-with-mbbs-admissions-in-india/articleshow/123139247.cms