PG Times

Trauma patients arriving at an emergency room here after sustaining a gunshot or knife wound may find themselves enrolled in a startling medical experiment.
Surgeons will drain their blood and replace it with freezing saltwater. Without heartbeat and brain activity , the patients will be clinically dead.
And then the surgeons will try to save their lives.Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have begun a clinical trial that pushes the boundaries of conventional surgery -and, some say , medical ethics.
By inducing hypothermia and slowing metabolism in dying patients, doctors hope to buy valuable time in which to mend the victims' wounds.
But scientists have never tried anything like this in humans, and the unconscious patients will not be able to give consent for the procedure. Indeed, the medical centre has been providing free bracelets to be worn by skittish citizens here who do not want to participate should they somehow wind up in the ER. “This is `Star Wars&…

After saying that medical associations were beyond its purview, the Medical Council of India (MCI) now seems to be suggesting that even doctors who are office bearers in these associations are beyond its jurisdiction.
The MCI has written to the health ministry claiming that it can't act against the officer bearers of the Indian Medical Association (IMA), even though all the office bearers are doctors and MCI has jurisdiction over the conduct of all registered medical practitioners. The MCI ethics committee had last June recommended action against four IMA office bearers citing the fact that they were medical practitioners. Now, the executive committee of the coun cil seems to be going against the earlier decision. The ethics committee had recommended that the names of four IMA office bearers be struck off the medical register for one year as they were harassing a doctor from Kerala, Dr K V Babu. The Kerala doctor had exposed how the office bearers of IMA were endorsing commercial …

The Medical Council of India (MCI) has scrapped an astonishing 32% of MBBS seats nationwide in its attempt to safeguard the quality of medical education. As a result, competition for the seats left will now be more cut-throat than ever before.  The MCI withdrew permission for 15,890 of the 49,950 MBBS seats nationwide. It cited failure of several colleges to arrange for minimum infrastructure required for ensuring proper education and training to future doctors. “In order to run a medical college, one has to meet the minimum requirements and regulation set by the MCI,” president of MCI, Dr Jaishreeben Mehta told HT. The biggest loser wasAndhra Pradeshthat had 2,100 seats scrapped from its colleges, followed byMaharashtra(1,675),Karnataka(1,650), Tamil Nadu (1,450), UP (1,400) and Bengal (1,200). But there is still hope for the axed colleges. “June 15 is the cut-off date to send their compliance report to MCI. If we find that they have been able to meet our requirements, we might reconsid…

The arrest of a 70 year old doctor in Barnala on allegations made by female relative of a patient has opened a pandora’s box for medical professionals. Despite countless witnesses (other patients) the police in its wisdom has arrested the doctor pending grant of bail. The truth about the allegations and possibility of blackmail will come to be known later but it does expose the vulnerability of male doctors who examine and deal with female patients and their relatives. What does section 354 state. It states that Whoever assaults or uses criminal force to any woman, intending to outrage or knowing it to be likely that he will thereby outrage her modesty, shall be punished. 354 A. Doctors are specially vulnerable to blackmail using this section as a tool since no exception of the kind given in section 354 D to sleuths has been provided to Doctors who need to touch a woman’s body during examination which may be misconstrued or deliberately projected as physical contact and advance invol…

Healthcare will now be made available right at your doorstep. Startups are using disruptive technologies to pioneer a medical care model to address healthcare needs at the comfort of homes, shifting from the traditional hospital-centric delivery platform. These companies not only provide basic healthcare but also specialty care to those suffering with chronic diseases, especially to a largely untapped elderly population at their homes.
Fuelled by the growing burden of chronic diseases in the country and rising demand for elderly care and post-surgery rehab services, companies like Portea Medical, Healthcare at Home, Medwell and India Home Health Care provide home visits from doctors, nurses and physiotherapists, and offer post-operative, palliative and ICU care.

Home healthcare is an established model in the US, pegged around $80 billion, while in India it is at a nascent stage, estimated around $3 billion and growing rapidly. Globally, geriatric care accounts for 70% of home healthca…

Union Health minister Dr Harsh Vardhan Friday said the Medical Council of India (MCI) has been a “big source of corruption” so much so that it has weakened the very edifice of medical education in the country. A clean-up in the medical education regulator, he said, is on the cards. “For a long time, the MCI has been a big source of corruption…instead of strengthening the component of medical education it has weakened it. I will go into the depth of it. I am not in favour of encroaching on its autonomy but the ministry should monitor and not allow them to be so corrupt. MCI is a big Pandora’s box, I do not get stuck there right at the beginning. Let me stabilise the other things in a couple of weeks and I will get to the bottom of it,” the minister said. Making a strong case for the common medical entrance test at undergraduate and postgraduate levels — National Eligibility cum Entrance test (NEET) is now caught in a legal tangle — he said reining in private medical colleges who charg…