The Indian Medical Association, India’s largest non-political platform of registered doctors, has urged the National Medical Commission (NMC) not to include MBBS interns for one-week mandatory exclusive elective posting in any one of the Ayush medicine disciplines.

The IMA national body has written to NMC on 15 July opposing the latter’s move virtually forcing the undergraduate medical interns to go for one-week mandatory exclusive elective posting in any one of the Ayush medicine.

The letter states that “observations on draft regulation for compulsory rotating internship 2021 placed into the public domain for opinion by the National Medical Commission, New Delhi’ is an attempt to initiate ‘myxopathy.”

The medical association wrote, “The IMA fully opposes the inclusion of one week exclusive elective posting which is contrary to the established norm, superfluous and an attempt to initiate ‘myxopathy’. The IMA strives for purity of profession.”

An MBBS student after completing four years of undergraduate MBBS course has to undergo one year of internship. “The internship is a period where young doctors after completing four-year course practice attending to patients under the active guidance of seniors. The NMC has published a draft of the internship procedure last week in which they have put a one-week mandatory posting in any one of the Ayush departments.

We have written a letter to the commission opposing the move,” Dr Jayalal, president of IMA, told The Statesman today from Delhi. “We hope NMC will take it in a positive sense and appropriate corrections will be done,” said Dr Jayalal. “Internship is a period of what you have learned will be practised since medical graduates have no options of learning Ayush in the undergraduate period it is not appropriate for him to come and practice in Ayush. IMA wants the purity of the system to be maintained and not mixing up,” Dr Jayalal said.

The IMA said there are many other branches such as family medicine, bioethics and these things should be included than taking one week exclusively for another system. Draft regulation for Compulsory Rotating Internship, 2021, released by the NMC has mentioned that a week’s training should be included in the rotational schedule as an elective in any of the Indian systems of medicine.