Comments by Dr.Sreekumari & her colleagues

The knowledge of the criminal justice system and its workings is an absolute necessity in the curriculum

1. The importance of the knowledge of the criminal justice system and its workings is an absolute necessity in the curriculum. The same should be learned from purely the medical man’s perspective. The legal fraternity including the defence and prosecution may have their own motives. The doctor should remain a witness whose main function is to assist the court by giving expert medical opinion which is fair, unbiased and absolutely independent. Hence it becomes imperative that legal medicine should be taught by men in the medical profession. 
2. The clinician has a prospective outlook which primarily is secondary and tertiary in nature.  His role is mainly in treating the injuries, restricting and preventing further damage and managing the complications of injuries, and not primarily in finding its origin of causation. A trauma physician/surgeon has so much in common with the forensic traumatologist as the fact that both deal with trauma. The similarity begins and ends there. The forensic traumatologist  is concerned with how the injuries are caused, its manner of causation and works for the public by giving his inputs to the courts and thus enabling civil and criminal legislations by a concerned legislative. Therefore it becomes crucially vital that the basic doctor, be thorough with forensics.
3. Forensic pathology and clinical forensic medicine procedures are medical procedures which should be ideally done by specially trained medical professionals (ie trained in forensic medicine). In our country due to lack of adequate numbers of trained forensic doctors, the bulk of the medical work of forensic nature is being done by MBBS doctors, or by doctors of the non forensic specialties’. Thus it cannot be over stressed that the basic undergraduate needs to know more about forensics than his clinical surgery. No MBBS doctor is asked to do an appendicectomy. But he surely will be asked to do medicolegal work irrespective of the branch of medicine of specialization, or whether he remains a basic MBBS doctor.
4. It is made amply clear in the statistics given in the MCI website that there is an acute shortage of forensic postgraduates in this country.  The solution to this problem lies in finding more forensic medical teachers in the long run, or a more practical use of the available resources in short term. The decision to remove a subject from being taught and evaluated during the MBBS course should be made only if the society thinks a basic doctor need not have the skills in that subject. The departmental objectives stated for the Forensic training of MBBS graduates are vital prerequisites for creating a doctor who is useful to the society.
5. The logic used also is flawed. If a deficiency of qualified personnel is found in a field, do we try to increase the number or down grade it? If the army faces a deficiency in its ranks, will we dismantle it?

 Soliciting an active and favourable decision in the matter

Yours truly,

Prof. (Dr.) Sreekumari and Colleagues

Department of Forensic Medicine, 

Medical College, Alapuzha, 

Kerala