Good morning. Today’s lead comes with homework attached, and it takes about ten minutes. Open your clinic’s Instagram and your hospital page before you read anything else. Most doctors will find at least one post that stopped being allowed the evening the NMC signed this.

— DR. ADITYA SETH, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

01  ·  THE LEAD
POLICY

NMC’s new advertising code bans the one thing every clinic posts

The National Medical Commission has issued a code on advertising and public communication, framed in view of a writ petition before the Supreme Court. It went to every state health department, every State Medical Council registrar and every medical college principal in the country, and it took effect the day it was published.

Nobody got a window to quietly tidy up. An advertisement is now any communication, in any medium, that directly or indirectly promotes your services, reputation, skills, qualifications, achievements or facilities. The code names the mediums so that nobody can argue about scope: social media, websites and blogs, WhatsApp and Telegram, podcasts, influencer marketing, sponsored posts, search engines, public interviews, online healthcare platforms, and anything generated by AI.

Before-and-after photographs are gone, along with patient testimonials, bought reviews and followers, and the whole vocabulary of guaranteed cure, No.1 specialist, 100% success and painless treatment. Festival discounts and referral benefits go with them. The penalty ladder starts at a warning and ends at removal from the register for three years. The rules also add one thing you have to put in, four details that belong in your bio, and that is the easiest item for anyone to check, so it is the likeliest one to be checked first.

WHY IT MATTERS
  1. Consent does not save the post. A before-and-after with the patient’s signed permission is still a before-and-after, and it is still banned.

  2. “My agency posted it” is not a defence. If you approved it, paid for it, or knew about it and let it run, it is yours. Paying an agency per patient it brings in is banned outright.

  3. Posting something true too often turns it into an advertisement. Announcing your new clinic timings once is fine. The same post forty times counts as soliciting patients.

02  ·  CLINICAL

A neurosurgeon won a court order against his hospital. His own email undid it.

He joined the institute in late 2005 and stayed more than twenty years, never on the payroll, an outside consultant on its panel, which is how most senior private practice in India runs. Last May the hospital wrote to him. The arrangement was finished and he had three months. He replied that same month, said he had received the letter, and asked them not to do anything that would harm patient care. It reads like a man handing over properly. In September the Calcutta High Court told him what it actually was.

03  ·  DOCTORS

Maharashtra’s medical register had doctors who never cleared the FMGE

The state Medical Council was working through registration applications when the files stopped agreeing with each other. In front of it were foreign medical graduates holding certificates saying they were registered to practise. In the examination records, the same people had never cleared the screening exam. Three arrests have followed, including a man in Nashik who police say produced scorecards and supporting documents for 15 to 20 applicants, for money. Nobody has yet said how many registrations are now being rechecked.

04  ·   CLINICAL

ACP graded every hot flash drug. Only one made them milder.

The American College of Physicians has ranked the drugs for menopausal vasomotor symptoms. Estrogen first, SNRIs second, everything else third. The two newest non-hormonal drugs carry better evidence than the ones ranked beside them and finished last anyway, for a reason that has nothing to do with how well they work. A second inversion sits in the outcomes table, and it is the one most of us would get wrong at the bedside.

05  ·   EXAMS AND ADMISSIONS

Free MD Medicine seats ran out at rank 3,822 last year

Paid seats went on to rank 65,195, seventeen times further down the list. In 2025, 53 of every 100 MD Medicine seats open to an unreserved candidate were paid ones. We have put every seat MCC gave out in Round 1 over three years, 5,919 of them, into one guide: what your rank and your category actually got, college by college, with eight rules for filling choices. Between ranks 5,001 and 10,000 there was no free MD seat anywhere in the country, and 542 seats sitting in a route most people never fill.

06  ·    ON THE FEED
Workplace safety
 

Another hospital, another scuffle, and a phone already recording

Video from Gandhi Memorial Hospital in Rewa shows doctors, nurses and others in a physical altercation outside the dressing room. A doctor and a nurse were reportedly assaulted. It is the third such incident reported from Madhya Pradesh this year. The footage that documents an assault is the same footage that circulates afterwards to harass the staff standing in it.

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