We need social physicians

Context: The inherently individualistic character of medicine needs a push towards social medicine in light of public health delivery during and after COVID which is both a medical and social calamity.

Challenges to Indian Medical Education:

• No linkage with humanities: As humanities studies inculcate feeling for inequity, stratification and deprivation, missing of such curriculum in medical sector generates apathy.
• Missing element of social orientation: Undergraduate Curriculum applicable since 2019 emphasizes on inculcating empathy but gives little attention to efficiency at societal level.
• Western influence: Indian medical education carries the cultural accretions of the West.
• Commercialization of medical profession: Commercialization has arisen from within the profession and only confined to medicine.
• Inequities and deficiencies: Deficient social orientation among physicians has contributed to their maldistribution.

Remodeling the foundation:

Need: to confer the ability to critically analyse how health and medicine function, creating a socially oriented physician capable of relating with macro-level challenges in public health apart from practicing social medicine.

• Along bio-social lines: Enhancing community exposure, conducting medical training at the lower level of medical facilitates along with integration of medical colleges with the health services system. 
• In curriculum: Need to pep up the community medicine curriculum teaching health policy, emphasizing on sociological and political-economic aspects.
• Tackle commercialization: Through inclusion of humanities in all technical curriculum.

COVID as an opportunity: The orthodox edifice of medicine has come under attack but it is also an opportunity to start entertaining ideas like private hospital nationalization and mainstreaming of alternative medicine.