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Role for homeopaths in family planning
Sutirtho Patranobis
The National Family Planning Programme was initiated by the Union government way back in 1951, but the continuously rising population has made a mockery of the programme.
Various reasons have been put forward by authorities for not being able to stem India’s rising population and reducing birth rate.
Experts on the issue say while awareness about the need to plan families is satisfactory, various sociological factors have contributed to the still high birth rate in the country.
The case is similar in Madhya Pradesh, where the fertility rate of 3.31 percent is still the fourth highest in the country. Contrarily, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in the country is 2.85 percent.
One of the reasons for a high TFR in MP, according to experts, is that in most parts of the state, villagers do not have access to trained doctors ready with advice on the intricacies of family planning.
Experts also realized that practitioners of the Indian system of medicine and homeopathy were in a position to fill up this gap. A large number of these practitioners, the state has around 40,000 of them, have clinics in the rural areas and are quite popular with villagers.
To bring some of these practitioners into the mainstream so that they could be trained to assist in family planning programmes, an unique workshop, jointly organised by the National Population Commission (NPC) and the State Institute of Health Management and Communications, was organised here last week.
The workshop, according to NPC member-secretary, Krishna Singh, was one of the first of its kind and has been taken up as a pilot project. A large number of practitioners, affiliated to the Private Medical Practitioners Association and Active Medical Society of M.P. were invited from remote rural areas to take part and learn from the workshop.
The major aspect of the workshop was training these practitioners to correctly advise couples, mostly from the lower economic strata, to use contraceptives. The training, according to Singh, would cover all aspects of family planning including side-effects and contra-indications.
It was also suggested in the workshop that their clinics could be used as depots to store contraceptives for distribution throughout the day. Further, charts and posters would be put up in clinics to inform villagers.
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