Doctors' Strike: IMA calls for nationwide strike today against Centre

New Delhi, Dec 11: Amid coronavirus, healthcare services across the country is likely to be severely affected today as the Indian Medical Association (IMA), the apex body of Indian doctors, has called for a nationwide strike against the Centre's decision to allow post-graduate Ayurvedic doctors to perform surgeries.

On Friday, the top medical body has called for withdrawal of all non-essential and non-COVID services between 6 am and 6 pm. However, emergency services, including casualty, labour rooms and emergency surgeries, will be exempt from the strike along with ICU and CCU.

The IMA condemned the Central government's decision to allow post-graduate scholars of Ayurveda to formally practice general surgery, including ortho and dentistry, saying that it saw this move as a "retrograde step" of mixing the systems which, it said, will be resisted at all costs.

The IMA further said that students and practitioners of modern medicine across the country are agitated over this violation of "mutual identity and respect".

"We unequivocally condemn the uncivil ways of the Central Council of Indian Medicine to arrogate itself to vivisect modern medicine and empower its practitioners with undeserving areas of practice. The said council has come out with a gazette notification of a list of surgical procedures which can be performed by its practitioners. They have no right to the technical terms, techniques and procedures of modern medicine. IMA draws the 'Lakshman Rekha' which they can cross at their peril," it said.

The IMA also asked its members and the medical fraternity not to teach disciplines of modern medicine to the students of other systems.

Last month, the central government had issued a notification which authorises post-graduate practitioners in specified streams of Ayurveda to be trained to perform surgical procedures such as excisions of benign tumours, amputation of gangrene, nasal and cataract surgeries.