Good morning. Four of today’s five stories are somebody else’s paperwork deciding what you may do next week: what a box of medicine is allowed to be printed at, who is allowed to pay for your CME, whose notes settle a twenty-year-old case, and where 63,177 of us will train. We open with the one that has a date on it.
— DR. ADITYA SETH, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
01 · THE LEAD
POLICY
₹2,700 at the chemist. ₹27,000 on the bill. The bench called it carnage.
A Supreme Court bench had the invoices for a cancer drug on Tuesday. It reaches retailers at about ₹2,700 and goes on the shelf at a printed ₹27,000. All of it legal: India caps only the medicines the government has decided are essential, and everything outside that list is priced at whatever the manufacturer chose to print.
Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta called that broad daylight dacoity with patients, then asked the government why any printed price in India should sit more than 16% above what the retailer paid. No order has issued and the question binds nobody, but before it adjourned to 12 October the bench said the case is finally about the ethics of the doctors dealing with those patients.
WHY IT MATTERS
The Centre’s own law officer told the bench that as he understood it, the pharma companies are not the ones benefiting from the gap.
The court described the admitted patient told to buy at the hospital’s own counter, and warned he may be told his treatment cannot be guaranteed if he brings the drug in cheaper from outside.
Where that admission runs on Ayushman Bharat, the printed-MRP bill comes back to the taxpayer. Somebody signs that claim.
02 · CLINICAL
France counted 19,092 diabetic pregnancies. GLP-1 drugs came out clean, until the authors rechecked their own work.
She is 34, six years into type 2 diabetes, on a weekly injection she stopped thinking about long ago. Nobody mentioned it also made her more fertile. The test is positive at seven weeks, so the heart formed with the drug on board throughout. Every guideline says stop before pregnancy; none says what to tell the woman who already didn’t. Against insulin, the French national data showed no rise in malformations anywhere. Then the authors reran it counting only prescriptions filled after conception, and the flat line moved.
03 · POLICY
Maharashtra banned infant formula advertising on Tuesday. The same order bans the company money behind your paediatric CME.
It took effect the day it was signed, no transition window, and it runs from the manufacturer down to the reseller group on your phone. Every pack now carries MOTHER’S MILK IS BEST FOR YOUR BABY on the front, and off come the images of infants and four particular words that let a tin imply it was close to breast milk. Paediatricians pick up a duty running the other way, reporting suspected adverse events in formula-fed infants. The clause the profession will feel is the one on sponsorship, hospitality and speaker fees for CME, where Commissioner Tukaram Mundhe prices a misleading advertisement at twice a substandard tin.
04 · MEDICOLEGAL
A cataract in 2006, a ₹1 lakh order in 2013, cleared this week. The notes that saved him were written by other doctors.
The eye was already in trouble, pathologically myopic with a detached retina a known risk, and the cataract had to come out. Midway through the operation the posterior capsule tore, so the surgeon closed the eye without the lens, planned to implant it once things settled, and wrote that decision down. The lens went in six months on. A year after that the patient’s vision collapsed, a detachment was confirmed, and a District Commission in Jabalpur decided the surgeon had caused it. The appeal that undid that order, thirteen years later, never argued about the surgery at all
05 · EXAMS AND ADMISSIONS
63,177 PG seats in the 2026-27 matrix, and five states hold half of them.
Someone exported the spreadsheet at 7.02 pm on 28 September, and the next day the Medical Assessment and Rating Board published it as a 197-page PDF. It is 10,756 lines across 645 colleges, and it is the whole map before counselling opens, because a college admitting past its approved intake breaches the NMC Act. Karnataka carries 8,323 of the seats and is only 28.5% government. Mizoram has ten. One line in the notice says the count is not final.
06 · QUICK HITS
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