A laudable step

Indian Spinal Injuries Centres deserve laurels for its decision to set up an exclusive laboratory to carry out quality checks of Indian implants with excellent technical support from glorious entities like IIT with a view to ensuring that our indigenous products satisfy global standards (Apr, 28)

Indian spine-surgeons have to choose between foreign implants and Indian implants.

Many important factors like research and development, marketing, manufacturers' support, quality control, instrumentation and the like, constrain our spine-surgeons to use foreign implants in almost all surgeries.

Added hereto is dismal absence of an effective regulatory body in India.

Coming to dependence on local products, we are confronted with lack of information about the source and type of materials used, details of the manufacturing process and quality control by the Indian implant manufacturers.

In spite of all these factors, our patients are loath to have foreign implants within, mainly because of the phenomenal cost difference.

Markets in the developing countries like India are replete with local producers whose products' quality varies considerably.

Patients choose between Indian and foreign implants based on their cost-affordability.

As to how these Indian implants fare in the market and how much marks they earn from recipients, we have very limited written data.

Notwithstanding such grey areas, our surgeons opine that indigenous implants are a safe and viable option to make spine surgery cost effective in the Indian scenario with not so much a strong financial background of patients.

Anyway, the proposed laboratory would add impressive colour to the overall health-care picture of our country.

E Sethuramalingam, Kollam