Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
It has become an annual ritual in Maharashtra. Every time the admission season for homoeopathy colleges begins, the decade-old debate over “mixopathy” resurfaces. Doctors protest, governments defend the move, and the controversy quietly slips into the courts – only to return the following year.
This year, however, the battle has escalated.
The Maharashtra government’s decision to begin granting Maharashtra Medical Council (MMC) registration to homeopathic doctors who have completed the Certificate Course in Modern Pharmacology (CCMP) has triggered an indefinite agitation by modern medicine doctors, who call it one of the biggest regulatory shifts in recent years.
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At first glance, the outrage appears contradictory. After all, BAMS (Ayurvedic) doctors have been prescribing certain allopathic medicines for decades in Maharashtra and several other states.
But doctors leading the protests insist that is precisely where the public conversation is going wrong.
Their fight, they say, is not against limited prescribing rights. It is something they believe goes much further – placing bridge-course-qualified homoeopathic doctors on the same statutory register as MBBS doctors.
That distinction, they argue, changes everything.
REGISTRATION, NOT PRESCRIPTION
Nearly 13 states – including Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Assam, Himachal Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh – already allow BAMS doctors to prescribe a defined list of modern medicines, largely for primary care, emergencies or rural health services.
Maharashtra itself has permitted integrated BAMS graduates to prescribe around 60 specified emergency and first-aid medicines since the 1980s.
Yet none of these states enrol Ayurvedic practitioners in the medical council that regulates modern medicine.
That, doctors say, is the legal line Maharashtra has now crossed.
The controversy centres on the CCMP, a weekend pharmacology course spread over a year that homeopathic doctors can pursue. Around 10,000 BHMS graduates are believed to have completed it over the years. Until now, however, completing the course did not automatically translate into registration with the Maharashtra Medical Council.
That changed when the state, just this week, began issuing registrations.
The move has revived a legal battle that has been pending since 2014, when the Indian Medical Association (IMA) and members of the Maharashtra Medical Council first challenged the government’s decision before the Bombay High Court.
“This is just a value addition… but this will not be considered as parity,” recalls Dr Ravi Wankhedkar, former national president of the IMA, referring to the High Court’s interim observations while allowing the course to continue without deciding the larger legal question.
The case remains pending even after the Supreme Court, in 2019, asked the High Court to expedite hearings.
According to Dr Wankhedkar, Maharashtra remains the first – and so far only – state to attempt such a model.
His argument is that states undoubtedly have the power to authorise limited prescribing of modern medicines because public health falls within their jurisdiction. But medical education, recognition of qualifications and registration of modern medicine practitioners are governed by central laws and national regulators such as the National Medical Commission (NMC) and the National Commission for Homoeopathy (NCH).
In other words, allowing someone to prescribe specified medicines is one thing. Declaring them eligible for registration as practitioners of modern medicine is quite another.
A REGULATORY GREY ZONE
Doctors fear that the implications extend well beyond professional rivalry.
Once a homoeopathic practitioner enters the Maharashtra Medical Council’s register, they ask, who becomes responsible if something goes wrong during treatment?
Suppose a patient receives modern medicine from a CCMP -qualified doctor and alleges negligence.
Should disciplinary proceedings lie before the Maharashtra Medical Council because the doctor was registered there? Or before the Homoeopathic Council because the doctor’s primary qualification remains BHMS?
Doctors argue that the present framework offers no clear answer. The concern is not merely administrative.
They argue that statutory registration carries with it an implied equivalence that patients may reasonably interpret as indicating training comparable to an MBBS degree.
That, they say, risks blurring distinctions between entirely different educational pathways.
The concerns become sharper when viewed through the lens of clinical training.
According to Dr Wankhedkar, the CCMP amounts to roughly 80 days of weekend teaching focused largely on pharmacology.
Prescribing medicines, he argues, is only one component of medical care.
Diagnosis, recognising complications, deciding when not to prescribe, managing emergencies and treating adverse drug reactions are skills developed through years of undergraduate medical education and supervised clinical exposure.
His criticism also extends to implementation. Since many participants are already practising doctors, he alleges attendance during the course itself has often been difficult to monitor, raising further questions about the robustness of training.
Modern medicine associations also worry about the larger public health consequences.
India is already battling one of the world’s highest burdens of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), driven in part by irrational antibiotic use.
Expanding prescribing authority without equivalent clinical education, they argue, risks worsening inappropriate antibiotic use and accelerating drug resistance.
QUESTIONS BEYOND HEALTHCARE
Doctors protesting the decision are also asking why the policy has resurfaced now.
For nearly a decade, similar attempts have reportedly coincided with the admission season for BHMS colleges.
The timing, Dr Wankhedkar suggests, deserves scrutiny.
Maharashtra has 56 private homoeopathy colleges admitting roughly 4,500 students every year. The sector is estimated to generate between Rs 350 crore and 450 crore annually.
If MMC registration substantially improves the perceived career prospects of BHMS graduates, doctors argue, it could also make homoeopathy courses significantly more attractive to prospective students.
Whether that is the motivation remains unproven. But the coincidence, they argue, is difficult to ignore.
The government also faces accusations of policy inconsistency.
Only weeks ago, Maharashtra cancelled compulsory government service bonds for some medical graduates, citing a lack of available government vacancies. Earlier recruitment for around 1,400 medical officer posts reportedly drew nearly 17,000 applicants.
Modern medicine doctors argue these figures weaken the long-standing justification that bridge courses are needed because India lacks enough MBBS doctors.
Adding to the controversy is the sequence of events.
The government constituted a committee to frame standard operating procedures for implementing the new registration system. Yet registrations reportedly began before those SOPs were finalised.
For critics, that reverses the normal regulatory process.
The protests have also drawn support from national doctors’ bodies. In a post on X, United Doctors Front (UDF)’s former general secretary Dr Arun Kumar said the move “compromises patient safety and weakens established regulatory safeguards,” urging the government to halt implementation until the legal issues are settled.
For protesting doctors, therefore, this is not simply another chapter in India’s long-running mixopathy debate.
If Maharashtra had merely expanded prescribing rights, as several states already have for Ayurvedic practitioners, the opposition would likely have centred on public health policy.
Instead, they argue, the state has ventured into an altogether different territory: one where registration, regulation and recognition intersect.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
