India trains quacks to ease shortage of rural doctors
Pioneering project by the Liver Foundation in Calcutta wants to give unlicensed doctors in rural areas some formal training, to help people in places where access to real health care is almost non-existent
There is a gigantic force in India – an estimated 2.5 million strong – of men and women who have picked up snatches of medical knowledge from a homeopath or chemist, or from a relative, or from working as a doctor’s assistant, who prefix “Dr” to their name and start treating patients in the remote village where they live, where there is no real doctor for miles.
For city dwellers, these self-taught men are quacks, perfect specimens of the truism that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. For Dr Abhijit Chowdhury, professor of hepatology at Calcutta’s Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education and Research, they are fillers of a void – the people who provide an invaluable service to rural Indians who have no access to proper health care and probably won’t for a very long time to come.
The Healthcare Federation of India said last March that India was short of two million doctors and four million nurses. It said about 70 per cent of the health care infrastructure was concentrated in the top 20 or so cities. That leaves a lot of the country out in the cold with not even a syringe in sight.
Chowdhury is founder of the Liver Foundation in Calcutta, a charity that has been training quacks for years, not to become not doctors, but to be better at what they do. The Foundation doesn’t like calling them quacks. It prefers to call them “informal rural health care providers”. “Empirical craftsmen” is another name Chowdhury likes to use.