Good morning. Quick test before you scroll: of everything a surgeon writes on a prescription, which line would a consumer commission care about most? Today’s lead answers it, with a failed ear operation from Bengal. Then comes a Supreme Court referral every MBBS student should watch, the Round 2 picture for Psychiatry, and the air report (the chai here in Karnal is fine; the air isn’t). Hit reply and tell me whether your own slips carry that line.
— DR. ADITYA SETH, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
01 · THE LEAD
MEDICOLEGAL
He chose surgery over hearing aids. When the graft failed, that choice became the surgeon’s defence.
He had lived with hearing loss in both ears for years, and in 2017 turned down an operation on his right ear after a referral hospital in the south warned it might not help. Nearly seven years later his left ear felt heavy. An ENT professor in Kolkata wrote both options on one prescription: a cortical mastoidectomy with an eardrum graft, or digital hearing aids for both ears. The professor operated twelve days later, and about two months on, his own follow-up note read “? Loss of graft”.
In 2025 the patient took the professor to the district commission in Bankura, saying the operation had cost him all the hearing in that ear. The referral hospital, which saw him again afterwards, never called the surgery negligent, and there was no expert evidence either way. The commission held that a surgeon who writes down hearing aids as the alternative has not promised the tympanoplasty would work, and on Wednesday it dismissed the complaint. The order is candid about one gap: nothing on the slip recorded what he was told about the likely result, so the commission inferred he had been told, from his long history with other doctors.
WHY IT MATTERS
Write the likely outcome beside the options, in the words you used: the graft may not take, hearing may not improve, a second operation may follow.
Add a dated line saying the patient chose surgery after that conversation.
A failed graft is not negligence on its own: a meta-analysis in The Laryngoscope found almost one temporalis fascia graft in five did not take.
02 · POLICY
No rural service affidavit, no NOC, says Karnataka. The Supreme Court has asked the NMC to weigh in.
Karnataka asks some medical graduates for a sworn promise of a year’s rural service before it issues the no-objection certificate they need for permanent registration, and a 2023 notification stretched that to private seats. Graduates from a deemed university’s private seats want their certificates without signing. On Wednesday the Supreme Court bench, which had floated the idea of one national policy in August, did what any busy consultant does with a hard case: it referred it, to the NMC. Its direction asks about rural service for doctors after MBBS and names no state. The next hearing is on 8 December.
03 · NEET PG
Psychiatry got 98 more seats, and its Open cut-off has already passed last year’s final
Government Open seats ran out at rank 19,747, in Karnataka; after both rounds last year, the last one went at 19,214. EWS and OBC needed better ranks than in last year’s Round 1, so the extra seats didn’t help everyone. DNB was no consolation prize: 39 of its 55 seats went to ranks that could have had a government MD. Last year about half the government MD allottees gave up their Round 1 seat, and Round 2 pushed every category deeper. Choice filling for Round 2 closes at 10 AM on 12 November, and the piece works out where each category could land if last year repeats.
The other eleven, ordered by the best rank that chose each: Medicine · Radiology · Dermatology · Orthopaedics · OBGY · Paediatrics · Surgery · Ophthalmology · Anaesthesia · Pathology · ENT.
04 · AIR QUALITY
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AQI · FRI 6 NOV, NIGHT India’s eight most polluted cities all read above 500. Haryana had three, Karnal included, and Punjab and Uttar Pradesh two each, on AQI.in’s live India ranking.
Other metros: Ahmedabad 244, Kolkata 217, Pune 191, Mumbai 187, Chennai 171, Hyderabad 168, Bengaluru 82. Every bar here is past 300, where AQI.in’s Hazardous band begins. At that level the US EPA advises everyone to avoid outdoor exertion, and people with heart or lung disease, older adults and children to stay indoors. The × figure is PM2.5 against the WHO 24-hour guideline of 15 µg/m³. Readings are US-scale AQI from AQI.in; India’s CPCB index stops at 500, so its numbers won’t match. |
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