A pathologist's signature on a report makes a specific claim: a qualified doctor looked at the findings, read them against the patient, and will own the interpretation. Earlier this week the National Medical Commission confirmed that nothing in the NMC Act, 2019 stops that signature from being applied remotely, with a legally recognised digital signature, on laboratory, pathology and radiology reports. The condition sits in the next line. The doctor must have gone through enough of the case to form his own opinion, and must hold back when what reaches him is not enough.

Dr Anan Jaiswal, a pathologist in Port Blair, has spent months asking government agencies about the part the circular does not cover. He says some centres print a doctor's name on reports that doctor never read, that one pathologist's credentials can be live at several centres at once in different cities, and that technicians log in as the doctor to release results. By his count India has around 3,00,000 diagnostic laboratories and fewer than 2,500 hold NABL accreditation. Port Blair has three pathologists and roughly forty provisionally registered centres, thirteen each. NABL's parent body accepted that a report authorised by anyone other than the designated person is already a non-conformity, then said NABL accredits voluntarily and cannot enforce. None of it has been tested by a regulator or a court.

She was six months old, admitted for an illness, recovered on the drip and cleared for discharge. A nurse came to take the line out. On the hospital's own account to the court, the nurse accidentally did something during the removal, and the baby's little finger was amputated. The nurse carried her to the emergency ward and told the duty doctor. The operation on the finger was done four hours after that.

The paediatrician and the management went to the High Court to have the FIR quashed. He was not in the room. He is a paediatrician, so he could not have operated on an amputated finger even standing there. Justice Anant Ramanath Hegde took the sequence as undisputed and then narrowed the whole case to that one window. The investigating officer has been told to take an expert's opinion on negligence before he files his report.

Which puts the timings written into that case sheet in front of someone who knows what should have been in them.

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The patient is one you have sent to theatre yourself. Septic, already on norepinephrine, serum lactate still above 2 mmol/L after fluid resuscitation, which is the marker that tissue is not getting the oxygen it needs. Four in ten had a perforated gut. Nothing settles until the source of the infection comes out, so he goes to theatre. On the table the anaesthetist is holding a mean arterial pressure of 65 mm Hg, the floor most sepsis protocols defend, and norepinephrine does that by constricting vessels. Pressure shows on the monitor. Flow does not, and the kidney is usually the first organ to say so.

Thirty-nine tertiary hospitals in China randomised 584 such adults. Half had dobutamine added, an inotrope that raises output by making the heart contract harder instead of squeezing vessels tighter, started at 5 micrograms per kilogram per minute and run until the operation finished. Acute kidney injury in the next seven days: 22.8% with dobutamine against 34.7% without. Roughly one injury prevented for every eight or nine patients treated, and every bit of the gain sat in the severe grades.

Death at 28 days and at 90 days did not move. Neither did dialysis, ICU days or time on the ventilator. There was also a price, and it was paid in heart rate.

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Three years of MCC Round 1 allotments, 5,472 MD Anaesthesiology seats, arranged into the only question worth asking before choice filling: what your rank and your category actually got.

Half of all open seats in 2025 were gone by rank 12,298. At rank 2,000 there were 168 colleges still taking open candidates; at 15,000 there were 72. Fifty-two of every hundred seats open to an unreserved candidate were paid ones.

Then there is the stretch from 19,029 to 25,000, where the free All India Quota seats have run out, five paid ones are left, and 326 open DNB seats are sitting there unclaimed by most people's choice lists.

Every college, every category →

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