Healers or Predators?: Healthcare Corruption in India by Samiran Nundy & Keshav Desiraju & Sanjay Nagral

Author:Samiran Nundy & Keshav Desiraju & Sanjay Nagral [Nundy, Samiran & Desiraju, Keshav & Nagral, Sanjay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP India
Published: 2018-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

III

MORALS, POLITICS, LEGAL ISSUES, AND CONSEQUENCES

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Degradation of Our Spiritual, Ethical, and Moral Heritage

A Personal Perspective

V.I. Mathan

The serene campus of the Christian Medical College (CMC) in Vellore and the traditions established by Dr Ida Sophia Scudder, the founder, nurtured me to be a doctor. The patient was the centre of the institution and no one was turned away for lack of money. Training of students on a gurukul-like residential campus was the priority of the faculty. Dr Scudder, known to us as Aunt Ida, was resident on the campus and her larger-than-life personality was the inspiration for all. Spiritual, ethical, and moral values were imbibed by us and we were trained for the vocation of healing, not just medicine. I retired from there in 1997 after 42 years in that community.

Fast forward to Chennai 2002 where I settled down after spending three years at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, an international health research institute in Dhaka, and a year with UNAIDS in Delhi after my superannuation from CMC. A friend with low back pain contacted me soon after arrival. A simple physical examination showed no abnormality, but he wanted an MRI scan. A day later he came with the pictures and the report in a sealed cover addressed to me by name. I was surprised, as the signature I scrawled on the scrap of paper asking for the MRI was undecipherable. When I opened the cover two crisp thousand-rupee notes came out with the report! They had asked the patient the details of the doctor who ordered the test and decided to give me my cut to ensure more such requests. Welcome to the reality of healthcare in the new millennium!

Aunt Ida and the traditions and ethos she established on the ‘protected’ campus at CMC Vellore were a far cry from the realities of practice in a metropolis in India in the first decade of the 2000s. At CMC you were part of a team whose central focus was the welfare of the patient. In the metro in 2002, I was forcibly being co-opted into a team whose central focus was money and the role of the patient was primarily to be provider of the money. It was apparently incidental whether or not the patient was helped as long as he could pay. The traditions I had learnt and assimilated as part of my medical heritage were no longer relevant in the globalized reality of this century.

Our Heritage

The affirmation of the primacy of the patient’s welfare outlined in ancient Indian texts, the Charaka Samhita and Susrutha Samhita, pre-dates the Hippocratic Oath by several centuries. The moral and ethical aspects of medical care are part of our heritage, handed down over generations in our motherland. Ethics in medical practice and research was not something that evolved after the Nuremberg Trials following the Second World War. The Helsinki Declaration, a reaction to the Holocaust and the crimes of the Third Reich, only codified the ancient moral and ethical tradition of Indian and Greek healers.

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