MDCN incorporates alternative medicine – Azubuike

How’s the council addressing the issue of quackery in medical profession?
There was somebody practising medicine in Lagos, it was in the newspapers, and we sent our inspectorate division in Lagos. The man had a hospital there. We met whoever it was and the case was referred to the law enforcement agencies. That’s where our job ends. Once we receive report of anybody practising without possessing the requisite qualification, we promptly act on it and report to the law enforcement agents for necessary action.

Are cases of indiscipline increasing or decreasing before the council?
Honestly, I won’t be able to answer that. But let me say something, the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria is a regulatory body. We should be regulating those out there practising the profession. What does that mean? It has to be there from January to December doing its work. If for any reason, the board is dissolved, nobody has any legal status to try anybody because both the investigating panel and the tribunal can only function when there is a council on the ground.
We were inaugurated in November last year, and we had our first meeting in January 2015. We looked at the record as far as we could go, and found out that from 1994 to 2014, this council was not in existence.
What does that mean? It means that in those years, our regulatory function was not being carried out and the new council felt very unhappy about that. Look at the lawyers, their council or whatever regulatory body they have has never been dissolved by any government, whether you have a government or not, they were functioning. Why should Medical and Dental Council, that is supposed to look after the health of our citizens out there, not be seen to be functioning? And we didn’t stop there. We raised a memo on that to our Minister of Health.
This council was set up after the last council was dissolved in October 2011 and the next one was set up November 2013. During those two years plus, we couldn’t do anything. During that period, people were allowed to continue to write their letters, and they continued to pile up. As at last week, the cases we were hearing were cases that have been piling up for the last one and a half years. So, we have a backlog and I can tell you, it is stressful because our promise to Nigerians is if you make a complaint, you have a right to get it heard.

Are you in anyway being influenced in the discharge of your duty?
We are not under any influence, my integrity is all I have and I try my best to lead the council based on that. Some of us are just ordinary Nigerians but we believe that if we are given a job to do, we should be doing it properly. We have nothing else. If anybody can say that he’s influenced us in the last one year, let him or her come up and say so.

What’s your reaction to the continued doctors’ strike at the national level?
If you read the Act setting up the council, there is not a word there on strike. Our duty is very clear, somebody has to complain about the behaviour of a doctor or dentist out there before my law will start taking action. I am a doctor, I am a Nigerian. So if something is happening in the country, we cannot fold our arms and behave like an ostrich – bury our heads between our legs and say it doesn’t concern us.
But in the last NMA strike which went on to August last year, we were having a plenary session of the council, it was supposed to finish on the third day, but this worried members of the council from every part of the country. We felt we cannot have a meeting for three days when there is a strike out there affecting every Nigerian and then go away and say, ‘We have finished’. We decided to take action from behind the scene.
We delayed our departure from Abuja for 48 hours and requested for members of the NMA because we wanted to talk to them as doctors to doctors, dentists to dentists, not because we have the legal authority but because we felt we can talk to our colleagues. We sat down with them, this council set up emergency committee…and we talked with them for six hours to tell them why it was necessary to call off that strike.
You know that strike was called off about two weeks later. They didn’t call it off immediately because to call off that strike, they needed to start from the state level. Nobody heard about it. We did it because we thought it was necessary to do it even though we had no legal status.

What’s the council’s role regarding alternative medicine?
The alternative medicine people were just doing their things; nobody actually knew what they were doing, nobody cared to know until the last couple of years. The Federal Government has mandated us to look at this practice of alternative medicine and see how it can be incorporated. So apart from medicine, we also have the responsibility of regulating alternative medicine. We have been working behind the scenes in the last one year, we have co-opted one or two of them into the board. In fact, in the next session of our council, we will devote more time to it because our people are using this facility and it is important that we advise them about it.
We have decided that in the next session between now and April, we will devote one day to alternative medicine so that the council, which has been mandated to help regulate it, can actually know about alternative medicine because if you don’t know, you can’t regulate. We are inviting some of those who are practising it to come and tell us what they are doing so that we will know. We have been given the responsibility and we want to accept that responsibility but first of all we want to learn before we can regulate.