Poonam Verma v Ashwin Patel (1996)

This is the crosspathy case: the authority for what happens when a practitioner registered in one system of medicine treats a patient in another. Module I asks how the profession is controlled, and the answer runs through registration; Poonam Verma shows that registration is not a formality but the boundary of lawful practice, and that stepping outside it is itself the wrong.

Its force lies in the route it takes. The doctor was not condemned because the drug he chose was wrong — an expert said his first prescription was correct in every respect. He was condemned because he was not entitled to be choosing at all.

The respondent held a qualification in homoeopathy. The complainant's husband developed fever on 4 July 1992. The respondent treated him until 12 July 1992 with allopathic drugs — ampicillin, paracetamol and others — for what he took to be viral fever, and without pathological tests. The patient's condition deteriorated; he was moved to a nursing home and then to Hinduja Hospital, where he died.

Before the National Commission an expert testified that the first prescription was correct in every respect. The Commission raised, as a question of national importance, whether a person qualified in homoeopathy is entitled to practise allopathy, and took the view that the homoeopath was negligent. The widow's claim went on appeal to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court decided the question against the practitioner. As the position is later summarised in Jacob Mathew v State of Punjab (2005), the doctor, registered and entitled to practise homoeopathy only, was under a statutory duty not to enter the field of any other system of medicine and since he trespassed into a prohibited field and prescribed the allopathic medicine to the patient causing the death, his conduct amounted to negligence per se actionable in civil law. He was held liable to compensate the widow.

1. Negligence is failure to exercise the skill one professes. A homoeopath who prescribes allopathic drugs holds himself out as having a skill in a system for which he holds no qualification.
2. But the Court went further than that ordinary test. Entering the other system breached a statutory duty, and breach of that duty made the conduct negligence per se.
3. Hence the correctness of the individual prescription was irrelevant. Once liability rests on the trespass into a prohibited field, evidence that this particular drug was the right drug cannot save the practitioner — which is exactly why the expert's testimony did not help him.

For a short note on crosspathy: define it (practice in a system in which the practitioner is not qualified, typically a homoeopathic or ayurvedic practitioner prescribing allopathic drugs) → Poonam Verma, Supreme Court 1996, negligence per se → the system-specific bars in the registration Acts → then the statutory qualification below.

The qualification matters, because the answer is not always no. The savings clause of the Indian Medicine Central Council Act 1970 preserves privileges conferred on enrolled practitioners of Indian medicine by State law, including the right to practice any system of medicine (s. 17(3)(b)). So whether a practitioner of Indian medicine may prescribe modern medicine depends first on the law of his State. The homoeopathy Act's parallel clause is narrower: it saves only the right to practise homoeopathy (s. 15(3)(b)). On mixopathy, the one provision covered here is s. 50(3) of the 2019 Act, under which specific educational modules may be approved across systems at the annual joint sitting of the three regulators, but only by an affirmative vote of all members present and voting.

What it does not decide: it does not decide whether an enrolled practitioner of Indian medicine may prescribe modern medicine in a State whose law confers that privilege; it does not make every departure from one's field criminal (the liability stated is civil); and it does not displace the ordinary Bolam standard for a practitioner working inside his own system, which is Module III.

A caution on the citation. This paper takes the facts and the Commission's view from the report at 1995 (1) CPR 276, and the Supreme Court's holding at (1996) 4 SCC 332 from its later restatement in Jacob Mathew; do not attribute to the Supreme Court reasoning beyond that restatement.