Dr S G Biju
Email: drbijugnair@gmail.com
We must understand that this is a very easy way in which the reputation of a doctor could be exploited for selling, publicizing and experimenting with a product freshly introduced into the market.
A fast spreading trend is being observed among the doctors of all major systems of treatment in Kerala to become sponsors of a few products of some multi-national companies through net-work marketing in the disguise of ‘magic cures’ or health promoting agents. By joining the net-work business, doctors are degrading themselves to cut the sorry figure of a foot-path seller who call out to the passers-by trumpeting the glory of some sub-standard product.
The products being marketed by the companies through doctors (as well as any business oriented man because they are only interested in the turn-out of the product and nothing else) are presented as supplementary to food or medicine or both. Claims are advanced that cancer to obesity will be solved by the product if taken with whatever medicine you take or, if no medicine, with whatever food you take or with both if you don’t mind. You must understand that this is a very easy way in which the reputation of a doctor could be exploited for selling, publicizing and experimenting with a product freshly introduced into the market. Think of it for a moment.
A doctor is prompted for a 20% commission of the sale proceeds of a drug/food product along with an additional bonus of 5 to 25 percent which they illustrate as lakhs of rupees on calculations, of course – only if their business flourish. And along with medicine, a doctor recommend and make his patient purchase, a non-medicinal product about which he does not know anything except its promoters preaching and tax his patient several hundred times than what he had levied if he had been cured by his medicine alone.
May I inform the readers that there is no medicine invented in the world yet that can be administered with homoeopathic medicine. When the right homoeopathic medicine is given, no other medicine is required to achieve the goal also. On the contrary, intake of anything other than natural food acceptable to the body will interfere with the recovery process initiated by homoeopathic medicine and inhibit the latter’s action in full swing. It is true for all other systems of medicines in best of my knowledge.
It is note that a homoeopathic doctor should not recommend a new product that is being marketed by anyone along with homoeopathic medicine but that he should not allow his patient to use the same simultaneously with homoeopathic medicine or so long as the patient is under the influence of homoeopathic medicine.
Promotors of the product of the multi-national companies are approaching doctors with endorsement certificates of successful doctors who make money out of the business. Our doctors should not be tempted to fall an easy prey into their hands under such claims. For an allopathic doctor, in the first place, such products are a relief because in case of 60 percent of sufferings they have got no effective medicine and secondly even in case of available medicines, those are apt to produce serious and far-reaching side effects. So an alternate medicine or a similar product, if offered with some specified benefits are readily accepted by them for trial especially if the experiment could be done with financial benefits.
Homoeopathic doctors need not worry over such things. His primary responsibility is to his patients and he should not compel his patient to incur enormous expenditure under the pretext of magic cures by which he himself will be delineating homoeopathy of its ability to cure patients of their diseases, because homoeopathy give primary importance to the patient and considers his disease secondary and it has got a philosophical basis on which the treatments of patients are designed. Above all our medicines do not evoke any undesired reaction also.
Then why my colleagues should descend to the level of the salesmen of a multi-national company ? I understand that a few of my esteemed friends of Thrissur and Kottayam Districts are in forefront with the network marketing business. Not that other Districts are behind. They are also following suit. Evidence presented by the promoters of these products of the multi-national companies indicate that the sale is being carried out mostly through homoeopathic doctors. Doctors of a system of medicine which least requires products of the aforesaid type for the purpose of curing diseases becoming agents of “ magic cures” is a deplorable contradiction!. We must be ashamed of our own deeds and realize that our action is no less than cutting our own grave in advance.
Why such things are happening?
It is to be recognized here that commercialization has entered your consulting room also through the back door. But I have to tell those who prescribe, “mushroom capsule”, magnetic bed, and medicated under garments to their patients along with medicines that they must first stop adulterating their system like that. Your legitimacy to practice medicine is being utilized with immoral greed to earn money. If you wanted to pursue your path like that you should not hesitate to give up whatever you have earned out of your system of medicine and start indulging in other businesses. Otherwise you will be answerable for encashing the confidence of the people in your system of medicine built up by the fidelity of your ancestors who remained loyal to the founder of your system of medicine all throughout their life.
In the past half century homoeopathy was smooth flourishing in Kerala. The optimum growth is witnessed since a decade now. The period coincides with the golden era of the prestigious, The Institution of Homoeopaths kerala (IHK) also. For the last 13 years IHK was working hard to convince the people of the supremacy of homoeopathy over other systems of treatment and to bring patients to Homoeopath’s consulting room. So this organization has got the right to dictate the etiquette of a homoeopathic doctor practicing in this State. The claim of increasing rate of ‘cure’ by the simultaneous use of ‘mushroom capsule’ is only available with its distributors and not substantiated with any concrete evidence. Doctors who know the real meaning of ideal cure and the effects of suppression will not subdue to such propaganda.
The overwhelming majority of doctors can hardly stand silent spectators of a demoralizing business being carried out by a negligible number of their counterparts. IHK is therefore requesting the latter to read the writings on the wall and to refrain from such degrading business hereafter. Patients are also requested for keeping an eye on such doctors.
How to do this work