For several decades, doctors of modern medicine have taken the Hippocratic Oath, an ethical code by which medical students across the world are bound. Now, a regulatory body plans to replace it with an oath in reverence of Charak, known as the father of Ayurveda. The idea is deceptively simple: to swap out “foreign” medicine values with the Indian “traditional” system of healing.
The proposal came from the undergraduate board of the National Medical Commission (NMC), a regulatory body supervising medical education, in a meeting conducted last week. If enforced, medical students will be taking an oath of integrity, during their white coat ceremony, in the name of the father of Ayurveda. “Modern medicine has a history of not over 200 years. Why should we continue to make doctors take oath in the name of a Greek physician when India has a rich past in medicine? This has been discussed in several meetings. It should be a matter of pride to take oath in the name of Maharshi Charaka,” said a source who didn’t wish to be named to Times of India. In other words, it is a step to inculcate “Indian values.”
This not only ends a decade-long rite of passage — but also means conflating alternate medicine with modern professional medicine.
You don’t have to be a doctor to know of the Hippocratic Oath. The historic code of ethics has flowed through Greek philosopher and physician Hippocrates’s time. The Charak Shapath is the oath found in Charak Samhita, a text on ancient Indian medicine which Charaka authored. Both in theory ask students to treat patients to the best of their abilities and focus on maintaining privacy.
“The Maharishi Charak Shapath has not been uploaded on the NMC site yet. I’m still waiting to see what they officially upload,” Dr. Shivangi Shankar tells me.
But the content of the Shapath found on Google is found wanting in some regards; the language, for instance, is evidently casteist and sexist. The NMO oath mentions ‘Dwij’ in the very first line. “Dwij as a term is rooted in casteism so Taking an oath as a ‘Dwij’ is casteism. There is no justification for this,” a doctor noted. The other code of conduct mentioned in the Shapath: “I (especially a male doctor) shall treat a woman only in the presence of her husband or a near relative).
“The directions asking to follow the commands of the ‘Guru’ without questioning him is against the views of modern medicine. The Charaka Shapath also encourages caste discrimination,” said Indian Medical Association Chairman Dr. M Muraleedharan.
“The oath doctors take cannot be rooted in oppressive terminology. Even if Dwij is removed from its original problematic meaning, I think the positioning of doctors as superior beings is arrogant,” Dr. Shankar says. “We need to take a more grounded approach.”
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