Kolkata, Dec 11 (PTI) Doctors of different hospitals across West Bengal Friday staged protests against the Centres move to allow postgraduate practitioners of Ayurveda to be trained in performing surgical procedures.
The Indian Medical Association (IMA) has demanded withdrawal of the notification.
Doctors in various hospitals in the city and in Murshidabad, Nadia, Malda, Uttar Dinajpur, North and South 24 Parganas districts wore black bands but carried on normal duties.
Some of them protested by waving placards which had the message 'Protest Day against National Medical Commission' and 'We oppose commercialisation of Medical Science'.
"No to mixture of modern medicine homoeopathy and ayurved,", Kaushik Bhattacharya of Doctors' Forum said.
"We are against the commercialisation of medical education and the nominated members of the National Medical Commission. We want self governance of our elected representatives," he added.
"We did not want the treatment of the patients to be hampered and that is why we did not go for a total strike," Hiralal Konar of the Joint Platform of Doctors told PTI.
IMA West Bengal secretary Santunu Sen, when contacted told PTI "The government of India started gradually centralizing the entire controlling power since long. They started dissolving the democratically elected bodies like the Medical Council of India and replacing them with hand picked people. Through the National Education Policy they have planned to ruin the Medical Education System.
The Centre, instead of promoting individual age old ancient system of medicine is "simply promoting quackery and mixopathy". "Will they themselves go to an ayurved surgeon for their own surgeries?" Sen asked.
On November 19, the Centre in a notification listed specific surgical procedures that a postgraduate medical student of Ayurveda must be practically trained to acquaint with, as well as to independently perform.
It invited sharp criticism from the IMA who questioned the competence of Ayurveda practitioners to carry out these procedures. It gave a call for withdrawal of non-essential and non-COVID services between 6 am and 6 pm on Friday to protest against the notification.
