The callous response to Dr Payal Tadvi’s suicide last year prompted me to write this piece. It’s an appeal to the medical profession in India to wake up to casteism in their midst before it is too late. The article was published in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics on 23rd Nov 2020. The full… Continue reading Caste and casteism in medical education and training in India
There has been a lot of commentary on how the Aarogya Setu app, publicized heavily by the Government of India, has hardly been of any assistance in the Covid control efforts. At the same time, it is important to note that perhaps the government was aware of its uselessness from the beginning, and that the… Continue reading Aarogya Setu: The dangerous obsession with technology in public health policy
For the previous posts in this series, see here, here, and here. [Throughout history epidemics have served as excellent windows into social and cultural beliefs and norms. While this contagion-catalyzed uncovering of a society’s thought processes helps historians understand past societies in better ways, for present societies it can potentially be utilized as a way… Continue reading COVID-19 in India – Society and Culture – PPEs, Frontline workers, and their families
This was published in the Wire on 18 Nov 2018. Here is the link, and below is an excerpt: “In 1972, a British doctor Archibald Cochrane wrote a book titled Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services. It had a great influence on ideas about decision-making in medicine and public health. Archibald was concerned with… Continue reading Cochrane and the challenges of producing trustworthy evidence in medicine
This review was published in Wire.in on 18 Oct 2018. Here is the full article. Below is an excerpt: As a former physician now studying the history of the medical profession in India, I found the chapters written by veteran doctors most interesting. M.K. Mani, who has been in medicine for the last 60 years,… Continue reading Review of the book ‘Healers or Predators: Healthcare Corruption in India’ by Nundy, Desiraju, Nagral
This was published in The Swaddle on October 1 2017. Here is the link and below is an extract: The government, having already displayed interest in addressing this issue, must arrive at an evolving strategy through a general consensus of patient advocates, doctors, nurses and midwives, public health experts, and social workers. It could begin… Continue reading Targeting doctors and hospitals is an unproductive ‘solution’ for unnecessary C-sections – it is time we enlisted them as partners
This was published on May 15, 2017 in theWire.in. Here is the link, and below is an extract. The much-loved and much-reviewed When Breath Becomes Air is a unique autobiographical work by US neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, a terminally ill doctor-turned-patient who died at age 36… It is useful reading for both the general public and… Continue reading WIth patients in India getting increasingly impatient with doctors, Paul Kalanithi’s memoir invites us to pause and think
This was published in ‘The Better India’ on May 6 2017. Here is the link, and below is an excerpt. New research from Harvard Medical School in the US, where too the ‘profit motive’ gets disproportionately blamed, emphasizes what could be called system factors: limited resources, high workload, limited motivation, and limited accountability. These put… Continue reading What we can learn from hospitals which have successfully brought down their C-section rates
CARING FOR INDIA 