Modern Hi-tech medicine has become prohibitively expensive. 62% of upper middle class Americans cannot afford health insurance. Nearly half of the British patients do not want to go to the free NHS hospitals. 80% of the world’s population lives without any touch with modern medicine. Hospitals are closing down in the USA. HMO’s are declaring insolvency one after the other. In this scenario, a developing country trying to ape the west looks preposterous.



While modern medicine is absolutely essential for about 10% of the illnesses, mostly emergency quick-fixe solutions, the remaining majority of 90% of the sick population can make do with some other time-tested remedies in the complementary systems of medicine.



Chronic illnesses, self curing diseases, and psycho-somatic problems that form the bulk of disease burden in the community could be managed in a very inexpensive way by using alternative therapies of proven value. I must hasten to add here that all and sundry should not be allowed to experiment on human beings.



Even in the area of diagnostic technology, time-tested clinical methods combined with careful listening to the patient, has been shown, by prospective studies to be capable of delivering 80% accuracy in the final diagnosis. The present medical education, however, exhorts the future doctors to use technology in all the one hundred per cent diagnostic situations. Medical education seems to be run by drug companies and technology manufacturers in the west today!



This talk attempts to delineate methods to carve out an affordable system of medical care delivery, combining the best in various systems of medicine in a judicious manner.