SOME OF INDIA’S most consequential health reforms have been led not by doctors, but by lawyers. When Novartis sought a patent over Glivec, the life-saving drug used to treat chronic myeloid leukaemia, it was lawyer Anand Grover, representing the Cancer Patients Aid Association, a Mumbai-based cancer advocacy NGO, who successfully challenged the patent before the Supreme Court. The judgment preserved India’s ability to manufacture affordable generic medicines, ensuring treatment remained available at a fraction of the patented price for millions of cancer patients in India and across the developing world.
Equally, many significant legal reforms have been driven by doctors. Following the death of his wife due to medical negligence, Dr. Kunal Saha spent nearly fifteen years litigating against the hospital and doctors responsible. His case culminated in the Supreme Court awarding the highest compensation in a medical negligence claim and fundamentally reshaped standards of accountability in Indian healthcare. Through People for Better Treatment, a Kolkata-based NGO working on medical accountability that he founded in 2001, he has since assisted hundreds of victims of medical malpractice.
These stories demonstrate that medicine and law are not competing disciplines but complementary ones. Yet a recent judgment of the Kerala High Court in T. M. Manju v. Bar Council of Kerala, delivered last month, moves in the opposite direction. It held that a registered homeopathic doctor must cancel her medical registration before enrolling as an advocate. At a time when healthcare is increasingly regulated by law and legal disputes increasingly depend upon scientific evidence, the question is whether India should be making it harder, or easier, for professionals to bridge the two fields.
