Journal of Medicine Vol 4 - Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences and ...

Amrita Journal of Medicine
EDITORIAL
Editorial Board
Patrons
Swami Amrita Swaroopananda Puri
Dr. Prem Nair
Mr. Ron Gottsegen
Dr. D.M. Vasudevan
Chief Editor
Dr. Harish Kumar
Associate Editors
Dr. Anand Kumar
Dr. Sudhindran
Editorial Assistance
Dr. V.P. Praveen
Dr. P. Gowri
Editorial Board Members
Dr. V. Balakrishnan
Mr. Sudhakar Jayaram
. Dr. Dilip Panikar
Dr. Prakash Kamath
Dr. S.K. Nair
Dr. Vaidyanathan
Dr. M.G.K. Pillai
Dr. Subramanian
Dr. Kanthaswami
Dr. Abraham Kuriakose
Publications Officer
Mrs. Jaya Sudhir Maharshi
Visualiser
Mr. Biju Chembalayat
Cover Illustrations
Mr. Biju Chembalayat
Mrs. Rajalakshmi Remesh
Dept.of Graphics, AIMS
Commercialization of
Medicine
Harish Kumar
People come to see a doctor when they are feeling ill,
either physically or mentally. The duty of a physician is
to then prescribe the necessary remedies to restore the
equilibrium and make the person feel better. It is a sacred
duty – the aim of which is to take an individual
from a state of “ashanti” to “shanti”. Once he is healed
or better the patient will gratefully compensate the physician
in cash or kind, as per his means. The physician
gains not only monetarily, but also is enriched by the
gratefulness and good wishes of the diseased person and
the family of those whom he has healed. The whole focus
of the patient-physician interaction is that the patient
must feel better, and there is an attitude of surrender and
trust on the part of the patient.
But in today’s world, medicine has become commercialized.
Pharmaceutical and other commercial companies
are interested only in profits and they can generate, and
sustain these profits only with the active support of the
doctor community. It is a well known, but not often admitted,
reality that commercial interests frequently
dominate prescription patterns not only in India, but also
all over the world. This has caused a subtle shift in the
attitude of many doctors whose primary focus is now on
the commercial gains from the profession and the service
provided to the patient has become secondary. The main
casualty in this new commercial scenario is the doctorpatient
trust. Patients are increasingly suspicious of the
intentions of doctors and ever-increasing medico-legal
litigations are the outward symptom of this malaise. The
‘trust’ and ‘surrender’ have been replaced by a business
like transaction, which takes away the sacredness of healing.
The other side of the coin is the benefit that has
accrued to the science of medicine due to this commercialization.
Enormous sums of money are being pumped
into research in various areas of medicine by commercial
organizations and our treatment and investigation modalities
are improving at an ever-increasing pace.
The majority of physicians are not commercial and
there is still hope if efforts are made to better physicianpatient
bonding. But unfortunately, today the success of
a doctor is measured by the amount of material wealth
he has accumulated from the practice of his profession.
If this trend continues then doctors and commercial organizations
doing business in the medical field may
become richer but the profession and its public image
are becoming poorer by the day.
2