Saying that the apex court does not mean to compare the two systems, it said that allopathy doctors perform trauma and emergency care, in addition to surgeries and thus their work was not equal to indigenous medicine practitioners.
The Supreme Court has said that doctors of indigenous medicine cannot be entitled to pay equal to allopathy doctors as the latter carry out emergency duty and trauma care which the former cannot.
on Wednesday, April 27, a bench of Justice V. Ramasubramanian and Justice Pankaj Mithal set aside a Gujarat high court order that had it that practitioners with a Bachelor of Ayurved in Medicine and Surgery degree are to be treated the same as doctors with MBBS degrees. The high court had also held that the former would be entitled to the benefits of the recommendation of the Tikku Pay Commission.
The Supreme Court said that it is not possible for Ayurved doctors to assist surgeons performing complicated surgeries, while MBBS doctors can do this, in addition to essential trauma and emergency services.
The court said it does not mean to compare the two systems.
“We shall not be understood to mean as though one system of medicine is superior to the other. It is not our mandate nor within our competence to assess the relative merits of these two systems of medical sciences,” the bench said.
Saying that the bench has “no doubt that every alternative system of medicine may have its pride of place in history,” the bench noted that indigenous medicine practitioners do not need to perform surgeries, and nor are they needed in post-mortem or autopsy functions. The bench also said that MBBS doctors in general hospitals attend to hundreds of patients.