Karachi: Indian medicos at a medical conference here urged Pakistani doctors to "cross the border" to sharpen their skills, saying it is cheaper than going to the US or the UK.
They also made a pitch for greater people-to-people interaction without being deterred by problems like terrorism. "For one Samjhauta Express there are 10 cross-border conferences," said Prof V K Kapoor, head of the department of surgical gastroenterology at the Sanjay Gandhi Post-graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow.
He was referring to the terror attack on the Lahore-New Delhi train at Panipat, India last month in which close 70 passengers died and over 100 injured.
While media on both sides of the Indo-Pak border highlighted security issues and terror attacks, not enough was said or written about artistic and academic interactions, said Kapoor.
Inviting Pakistani surgeons to study in India, Dr Parveen Bhatia, laparoscopic surgeon and medical director of the Bhatia Global Hospital and Endosurgery Institute, New Delhi, called for a change in approach.
"We curse the darkness but we don't light a candle. We need to unlearn, learn and then relearn," he said.
"We don't need British or American solutions to our problems. Pakistani solutions can apply to Indian problems and Indian solutions can apply to Pakistani problems because our circumstances are the same," Bhatia said.
Dr Adarsh Chaudhary of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, New Delhi, backed Kapoor's assertion that local doctors should train locally. In fact, he is proud that he went to school in India. Doctors in India work in more volume, he argued, "which is why there is better training."
The trio is attending the 23rd annual congress of the Pakistan Society of Gastroenterology and GI Endoscopy.
Elaborating on Bhatia's point, Kapoor said that in his area of specialty (abdominal tuberculosis), about one-third of the people of the Indian subcontinent have had a tubercular infection. Doctors from the West don't have as much practice in dealing with tuberculosis as it is not a widespread disease in their part of the world. This is why local doctors should train at home instead of going abroad, Kapoor stressed. The living conditions in the subcontinent, proximity and poverty, for example, mean that TB spreads easily here.
Kapoor said that Indian surgeons were attracting more and more patients from Western countries. The NHS waiting lists are long for surgery in the UK, he said, citing one example of why British patients were coming to India. He has also treated people from Nigeria and Romania.
Chaudhary has been involved in live donor liver transplants. When it was pointed out to him that Pakistan was looking at new cadaver organ transplant laws, he said that this was encouraging. Even in India there is reluctance to harvest organs from brain dead people due to cultural and religious beliefs, he said. | 
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