Pune: The Warje police on Wednesday arrested an electro-homeopathy and naturopathy practitioner on charges of running a clinic since 2002 without any registration and valid qualification.
The man was identified as Bibhuti Bimal Bagchi (43), a resident of Warje. The case was filed based on a complaint by Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) officials.
The police also invoked charges against Bagchi under sections 33 (medical practice by person not registered), 35 (colourable imitation of degrees, diplomas or licences), and 36 (unauthorized addition of title or description to name) of the Maharashtra Medical Practitioners Act, 1961.
Police said Bagchi claims to have a qualification in BEMS (Bachelor of Electro-Homeopathy Medicine and Surgery) and ND (Naturopathy Doctor) and was mainly treating patients suffering from piles.
TOI called Bagchi for comment on the development, but his cell phone was switched off; a text message sent to him returned as undelivered.
Senior inspector Manoj Shedge of the Warje police said, “PMC officials recently carried out a verification of Bagchi’s degrees and related aspects and concluded that they were ‘bogus’. They approached us and lodged a complaint stating that Bagchi cannot practice, treat or prescribe medicines to patients. His clinic has been locked for the past one week.”
Dr Aruna Tarde, PMC’s ward medical officer for Warje-Karvenagar, told TOI, “We had received complaints from citizens about the clinic. When we visited it last month, we found that the certificates he had hung up on the walls were all fake. We also found a prescription for allopathic medicines, as well as syringes and vials. We then forwarded a detailed visit report with all the documents to the PMC legal department, seeking its opinion.”
She added, “The law department cross-verified and found that the BEMS degree he had put up was not a real document, but a fake one. We also found that he was not registered with any medical council in the country. He portrayed himself as a piles treatment expert, but he had no requisite qualification. All three certificates he had put up were fake, which we got verified from the Maharashtra Medical Council. The biomedical waste management system at the clinic was not in place either.”
Electro-homeopathy is part of alternative medicine therapy. The Supreme Court had said in an order on Jan 22, 2015, that ‘there is no ban on the medical practice of electro-homeopathy’.
More recently, in May this year, the Lucknow bench of Allahabad High Court ruled that there is no ban on the practice of electro-homeopathy as an alternative therapy, nor is there any restriction on the issuance of certificates for study of this system of medicine — but no degree or diploma can be granted by any institution for want of statutory rules in this regard. The HC bench, however, specifically warned that those practising electro-homeopathy cannot write ‘Doctor’ as a prefix to their name.
