New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that the practitioners of the alternative system of medicine, who do not perform complicated surgery, do not attend emergency duty, are not entitled to equal salary to that of their allopathic counterparts.
However, the alternative system of medicine like ayurveda has its importance and pride in history and should be promoted across the country, a bench of Justices V Ramasubramanian and Pankaj Mithal said that presently the practitioners of different streams are not treated equally in terms of salary because the MBBS doctors in government hospitals perform statutory duty like conducting post-mortem that their ayurvedic fellows are not allowed to perform. The bench added that thr MBBS doctors attend hundreds of patients in OPD in hospital, which is not with the Ayurved practitioners.
“Allopathy doctors are required to perform emergency duties and to provide trauma care. By the very nature of the science that they practice and with the advancement of science and modern medical technology, the emergency duty that allopathy doctors are capable of performing and the trauma care that they are capable of providing, cannot be performed by ayurved doctors,” the bench.
The court ruled out an order of Gujarat high court which held that those who pursuing degree in BAMS(Bachelor of Ayurved in Medicine and Surgery) should be treated equally with the MBBS degree holders doctors.
The further said, ” it is not possible for Ayurved doctors to assits surgeons while performing complicated surgeries. We shall not mean as one system of medicine is superior to other. it is not our mandate nor within our competences to assess the relative merits of these two systems of medical science. We are conscious that the history of Ayurveda dates back to several centuries.”
