Edited by R. Srivatsan, Susie Tharu and Anand Zachariah

Published by Orient BlackSwan (2010)

High medical costs, the impersonality of technology driven specialty medicine and the difficulty in accessing curative primary care are three visible aspects of a crisis for medicine in India. Towards a Critical Medical Practice is the outcome of a dialogue between a self- critical medicine and the new social sciences that offers original perspectives on the crisis.

The book has a set of historical studies that provide fresh insights into the dilemmas that surround cholera, kalaazar, post-traumatic stress disorder, ischemic heart disease and undernutrition in contemporary India. Papers in another group argue that the public health focus on large-scale preventive programs has resulted in the underdevelopment of primary care in the curative mode. This deficit in curative care is targeted by the new corporate hospitals, which adopt an expensive and inappropriate form of tertiary care, ill-equipped to provide appropriate medical care in the context of our everyday living.

There is also a path-breaking study which captures the drama of the crisis as mirrored in the lives of the poor, battling illness on an everyday basis.  A dialogue between patients about the discourse of medical practice attempts to understand how patient experience could be usefully transformed into a form of knowledge about illness.

Doctors practice against this formidable backdrop of technical knowledge, orientation and elitism of modern medicine. The constant everyday work of translating this knowledge and everyday experience to address a local situation and do justice to the individual patient remains largely invisible and undervalued in modern medicine.  We argue that theorizing this practice, be it in teaching or in research, will open up new directions in health care and medical education.

Book Review

  • Economic and Political Weekly, Vol XLVII, No 40, October 6, 2012. Click here.
  • Christian Medical Journal of India, Vol. 27,No. 2, Apr-June 2012. Click .here.
  • ‘The National Medical Journal of India’, Vol. 24, No.4, 2011. Click here.
  • ‘The Hindu’, June 28th, 2011. Click here.

ISBN-13: 978-8125040910

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