Union health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, is in a hurry to apply the healing touch to medical education in the country. As a doctor himself, he believes he is eminently qualified to do so. But the minister should remember that an ill-thought out doctoring of the existing course may end up making the cure even worse than the disease.Nobody would argue against the need to modernise the medical curriculum in order to expose students to technological and scientific advances and to make them aware of the pathology of new and emergent diseases. A case can also be made for the need for medical practitioners to be trained to understand the principles behind the major alternative systems of medicines that presently exist. But the minister’s suggestion that traditional medicine be made part of the MBBS is problematic, to say the least. The fact is that allopathy — based on the system of classifying diseases on the basis of clinical examination and observation — is quite removed from, say, the tridosha approach of Ayurveda, which explains good health in terms of the equilibrium in the three humours of vata, pitta and kapha in the human body. To attempt to bring the principles of one system into the teaching of the other would be to create an irrelevant melange of information and methodologies in a situation where students are already under a serious information overload.The health minister would be more usefully employed in turning his attention to the bigger picture when it comes to medical education in this country. The fact is that today India could do with many more doctors than the present system is able to train. We could gainfully liberalise the sector of medical education in the country, just as we did education in engineering.
