Institutions should take responsibility for student suicides

I was greatly saddened to hear the news of a young resident, Dr Payal Tadvi, committing suicide at the BYL Nair Hospital and Topiwala Medical College in Mumbai. However, it is heartening to see that some fellow students, her family and the Tadvi Bhil community have made this issue public and are rallying for justice for her. Meanwhile, the three seniors that she has named have been arrested and, a faculty member suspended.

Film review : Changing mores of urban.

Vicky Donor, released in April 2012, is a comedy about the life of Vicky Arora, a young middle-class Punjabi man living in South Delhi, who becomes a commercial sperm donor. It is an addition to the look-feel-smell real genre of small films that are changing the face of Hindi cinema. When it was released, it was marketed, for all intents and purposes, as a sex comedy. Thankfully, it veers safely away from the risk of regressing into one. Instead, it takes a light-hearted look at the changing life of urban, middle- class India. It is rare to find a film about men and reproduction and, hence, this film needs to be noticed.

The NBC and the bioethics movement in India.

It is well known that bioethics evolved in the West as a result of series of scandals and a public outcry over the misuse of authority and control by the medical profession. By comparison, in India, the medical profession has not faced such public scrutiny or censure. Modern medicine, in particular, has been the product of the state in India. Unlike in the West, where the medical professional emerged largely as part of an entrepreneurial profession, which was only later brought into a nationalised service, in India, modern medicine was “built up” by both the colonial and the independent Indian state as the vehicle of modernity and welfare.

Drug promotional practices in Mumbai: a qualitative study.

We conducted a qualitative study to determine the range of promotional practices influencing drug usage in Mumbai. Open-ended interviews were conducted with 15 senior executives in drug companies, 25 chemists and 25 doctors; focus group discussions were held with 36 medical representatives. The study provided a picture of what might be described as an unholy alliance: manufacturers, chemists and doctors conspire to make profits at the expense of consumers and the public's health, even as they negotiate with each other on their respective shares of these profits. Misleading information, incentives and unethical trade practices were identified as methods to increase the prescription and sale of drugs. Medical representatives provide incomplete medical information to influence prescribing practices; they also offer incentives including conference sponsorship. Doctors may also demand incentives, as when doctors' associations threaten to boycott companies that do not comply with their demands for sponsorship. Manufacturers, chemists and medical representatives use various unethical trade practices. Of particular interest was the finding that chemists are major players in this system, providing drug information directly to patients. The study also reinforced our impression that medical representatives are the least powerful of the four groups.