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By Cliff Samuel
Sometimes, patients are incapacitated for life and at other times even have to pay with their lives. Much of it goes unreported since most deaths occur some time after the patient has been under the treatment of the quack and especially if he dies at home. Only if it is a glaring instance of foul play, where a seriously ill patient dies almost immediately after the administration of some drug at the clinic, that people begin to cast aspersions on the credibility of the “Doctor”. And that is when the so called doctor if he happens to be a quack, panics and usually spills the beans especially when up against police pressure to speak the truth.

While a vast majority of our doctors can’t resist the lure of lucre and seek greener pastures of practice overseas or in towns and cities here in India, the rural folk are left to choose from many such pretenders. These men know virtually nothing about medical science or for that matter about human anatomy and physiology. They have usually been old fashioned “Compounders” who had worked with some doctor or the other, or for that matter, aspiring students of medicine, or even dropouts of medical colleges. Some of them have pursued short–term correspondence courses in some alternative system of medicine or the other offered by universities that are not even recognized and start practicing, when they prescribe even allopathic drugs to unsuspecting patients who approach them like the proverbial lamb being led to the slaughter!

Read more: Quackery