BACK TO BASICS: Medical Education Minister V.S. Acharya speaking at the inauguration of the 10th National Convention of the Federation of Family Physicians Association of India in Gulbarga on Saturday.

GULBARGA: Medical Education Minister V.S. Acharya has said there is need to place more emphasis at the undergraduate level on comprehensive healthcare and the significance of the family physician, and to make training and evaluation in such courses more patient-oriented.

Delivering the address as chief guest at the 10th National Convention of the Federation of the Family Physicians Association of India here on Saturday, Dr. Acharya, said that the country should draw lessons from the Malaysian and European system of training medical students at the basic level to serve society.

He said there was a need for starting postgraduate courses in family medicine. He said that despite the fact that there were such courses approved by the National Board of Examination and the Medical Council of India (MCI), medical colleges and universities had not started them. He said one of the main reasons for this was that the MCI, while approving such courses, had added a rider that colleges wishing to start them would have to forego the postgraduate seats sanctioned for general medicine. He appealed to the MCI to withdraw this condition immediately.

Dr. Acharya spoke in detail on the history of the medical profession in the country from ancient times. He said that in the Vedic period, doctors had been highly respected by society. The concept of the family physician had been especially strong then and such doctors used to play a major role in preventive medicine, he said.

Unfortunately, he said, through the ages, due to many factors the long cultivated tradition of holistic medicine got sidelined and from the late 18th century, the country got more exposed to the influence of Western medicine. In their eagerness to copy the Western model, the planners of medical education forgot factors such as the large population and size of the country, and gave importance only to specialisation and super-specialisation, he said.

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