Sailesh Lodha1, Vipan Talwar2. 1. Senior Consultant, Endocrinology, DEAR Society and Eternal Hospital, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. 2. Senior Consultant, Endocrinology, Golden Hospital, Jullundhar, Punjab, India.
Sir,The article “Endocrinology training in India” by Bajaj et al.[1] have covered nicely the full spectrum of the endocrine training process in India. Similar information has also been highlighted by Selvan et al.[2] However, we want to highlight a few lacunae in our system. Endocrinology curriculums in India are purely academic. These courses churn out high-quality clinicians who have been serving the people in India and abroad. A Doctorate of Medicine (DM) student is kept extremely occupied by the highly demanding job. After passing out most of the candidates are young and relatively new to face the society in their new role. These super specialists are never taught how to tackle the patient's relatives and attendants who are agitated or are in bereavement stress. In practice there is pressure from pharmaceutical firms to prescribe their products, there is a need to train DM candidates to handle pharma in this regard. The field of a clinical trial is now well established in India, but a fresh specialist is unaware of the intricacies of clinical trials. Some topics are hardly taught theoretically or practically like hormone therapy in infertility and in vitro fertilization techniques, erectile dysfunction, genetics, and nutrition. How to establish a diabetic or endocrine clinic? if this is also taught during the training it can be very useful for a novice in future. The training in all the institutes is not uniform as the investigative facilities and infrastructure is not similar. A short-term periodic rotation of all the DM candidates among various institutes may be a way to allow every candidate to have a wide exposure. Lastly, training regarding handling media and camera should also become a part of the curriculum as nobody is ever going to teach this art.