Good morning. A short issue today, and all of it is usable. A wrist fracture that cost one surgeon ₹12 lakh and cleared the other on four words. A Navratri story the Gujarati press got exactly half right. And every MD Pathology closing rank, by college and by category.
— DR. ADITYA SETH, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
01 · THE LEAD
MEDICOLEGAL
No expert gave evidence on either side, and the commission still found one of the two surgeons negligent
In December 2022 a 38-year-old advocate in Telangana caught her hand under a house gate while she was playing with her children. The X-ray at a small hospital in Huzurnagar showed a distal radius fracture with dislocation of the ulna, and the surgeon fixed it the same night: open reduction and internal fixation with a three-holed locking plate, home in two days. The wrist never loosened up, and her thumb and index finger would not flex. Four months later a CT at another hospital showed what she says were screws sitting in the wrist joint, and she was told to have the implant out. At six months a senior surgeon in Hyderabad took it out.
She asked for ₹50 lakh. In September 2026 District Commission III at Hyderabad awarded ₹12 lakh against the first surgeon and his hospital, with 9% interest running from the filing date, and dismissed the case against the second surgeon outright. The commission accepted the entire textbook defence, that the fracture was displaced and needed fixing, that locking plates are accepted practice, that consent was written and promised nothing, that stiffness happens and a bad outcome is not proof of a bad doctor. Then it asked the narrower question. The five documents on file, a prescription, a consent form, two sets of nursing notes and a progress sheet, could not answer it. Neither side put up an expert.
WHY IT MATTERS
A consent form proves consent and nothing else. It cannot show a judge where the screws went, and where the screws went was the only question the commission ended up asking.
A consumer commission can find negligence with no expert evidence at all. The same silence in the record that sank the first surgeon is exactly what cleared the second.
Four words decided the second case. His discharge summary read “may need tendon transfer”. Had it read “needs tendon transfer”, the commission would have taken it as an obligation he walked away from.
02 · DOCTORS
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Doctors
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On 14 October Surat produced two medical stories, and only one of them got checked
TV9 Gujarati ran the first as a Navratri human-interest piece. A woman doctor took a late-night emergency call, walked off the Garba ground still in her festival clothes and reached her hospital to treat a critically ill patient on ventilator support, referred in from Bardoli. He lived. She told the channel it felt like the goddess’s own blessing. Nowhere does the report say which system of medicine she is registered in, and nobody at the channel appears to have asked.
The second story came out of the Pandesara industrial belt the same day. Surat SOG and the district health office sent decoy patients into sixteen clinics, then raided all of them at once. Sixteen people were arrested for treating patients without a recognised qualification. Several had worked as compounders before setting up on their own, one of them allegedly in practice for thirty-three years. Officers found glucose drips running into patients lying on ordinary wooden cots. Proceedings under the Clinical Establishments Act are being prepared.
What separates the two stories is whether anyone checked the register. That question was settled in May 1996, when the Supreme Court decided Poonam Verma v Ashwin Patel. A practitioner registered in one system who treats in another is negligent per se, and the complainant has to prove nothing further. The word the Court itself used for such a practitioner was “quack”. Allahabad High Court applied the same rule again this July, against a man holding an electrohomeopathy certificate.
Saying it out loud is now the risky half. In June the homoeopathy regulator under AYUSH circulated a warning that calling a registered homoeopath a quack is defamatory and legally actionable, and a hepatologist’s post about that circular was blocked inside India within hours under the IT Rules. One of those documents is a Supreme Court judgment. The other is a council circular. There is not much doubt about which one a consumer commission reaches for after a ventilated patient does not survive.
Sources: TV9 Gujarati, 14 Oct · the Pandesara arrests · Poonam Verma v Ashwin Patel · the AYUSH circular
We are reporting this one out properly. If a cross-pathy case has gone through your own hospital, the tip line is open.
03 · EXAMS AND ADMISSIONS
Free MD Pathology seats ran out at rank 36,444 last year. Paid seats carried on to 137,830.
Every MD Pathology seat MCC gave out in Round 1 across 2023, 2024 and 2025, all 2,981 of them, sorted by college and by category. In 2025, 54 of every hundred seats open to an unreserved candidate were paid. Half of all open seats were gone by rank 24,306, and nobody in the top 1,000 took the branch at all.
Last rank to get a free All India Quota seat: Open 36,444, EWS 62,085, OBC-NCL 43,765, SC 64,648, ST 99,228. Maulana Azad closed hardest, at 8,633. Between 36,445 and 50,000 there was no free seat left anywhere in the country, and 71 open DNB Pathology seats, which is the door most candidates never try.
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