WHITE COATS AND GOLD CHAINS: INDIAN HEALTH CARE - Softcover

KAPOOR M.D, Dr. ATUL

9798250704847: WHITE COATS AND GOLD CHAINS: INDIAN HEALTH CARE

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798250704847

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

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This book has documented failures, paradoxes, and pathologies. It has been, by necessity, a catalogue of what has gone wrong. But it would be dishonest to end without acknowledging what is right.
Every day, across India, doctors perform surgeries in district hospitals with inadequate equipment and save lives. Nurses manage wards with twice the patients and half the resources they need. ASHA workers walk kilometres through heat and rain to ensure that a pregnant woman gets to a facility for her delivery. Medical students, despite the brutalising system they are trained in, graduate with an idealism that survives the pressures that seek to crush it.
The white coat still means something. It still represents a promise: that the person wearing it has dedicated years of their life to the acquisition of knowledge and skill for the purpose of alleviating human suffering. The tragedy of the Indian medical system is not that this promise has been abandoned. It is that the system within which it operates has made it so difficult to keep.
The gold chain need not be the destiny of Indian medicine. But removing it will require money, and political will, and institutional reform, and a fundamental reorientation of incentive structures. It will require India to decide, as a society, that the health of its people is not a luxury to be rationed but a right to be guaranteed.
The resources exist. The talent exists. The knowledge exists. What has been missing is the collective determination to build a health system that serves all Indians, not just those who can afford to pay. If this book contributes, even in a small way, to that determination, it will have served its purpose.

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