The IIT Mumbai recently held a tech fest. It was an extraordinary opportunity for engineering students from around the country to participate in diverse competitions like making robots, harnessing renewable sources of energy, designing ecofriendly houses, building boats that run on solar power and making machines out of junkyard scrap. Most good engineering institutes have this kind of technical festival, apart from the cultural festivals which medical colleges also hold.

My plea is that we need to have some kind of parallel in medical institutes to foster a sense of innovation and creativity in medical students which is systematically crushed during the years in a medical school. If we encourage our students to innovate we are sure to discover better and cheaper ways to practice medicine. It could be simple things like an easier way to collect urine in a newborn, or take the temperature or to auscultate heart sounds. Not everything in medicine needs FDA approval or long drawn out clinical trials.

Efficiency isn’t everything and we must learn to cultivate creativity(1).