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factors like eating habits, smoking, exercise, stress etc. over which doctors hardly have any control.
The Jain society is primarily a business society. Therefore, it is our pious duty to open and run efficiently ecofreiendly food shops in a most modern and scientific manner. If possible, we must subsidise food items and encourage their sales to consumers and foster their marketability.
We must know the admission made by the American college of surgeons that about 30 percent of the surgical operations (about 45 lakh operations) are completely unnecessary and an additional 50 percent are beneficial but not essential to save or extend life. Such operations are intended mainly to sharpen the surgeon's skill treating the patients as guinea pigs. No figures are available for India, but situation can't be better here. A paper published in 1977 by John and Sonia Mckinley makes the astonishing claim that wherever there was a doctors's strike as in U.S., Canada, England and Israel the death rates in the affected areas actually fell. Some medical researchers have found that one of ten patients in Indian hospitals suffer from adverse drug reaction.
Jain culture can play a key role in economic development that enables people to live happily, without any tension and in harmony with others in the community and with nature. We must design such economic development which take care of cultural patterns and cultural sensibilities. We must follow and practise our cultural ethos in the process of economic development. We must establish centralities of our ethos and cultural forms in the main streams of economic development. We must adopt such model of development which is environmentally and culturally sustainable.
It is most essential to promise the nature conservation and environment protection for sustainable and equitable development of our society and our nation. Not only the survival of our culture and our nation but the survival of our plannet is under greater threat than ever before. Mankind is destroying the environment at such a rate that nature can no longer fight back alone and replenish it. Before it is too late, we must awake to the biggest challenge, the survival of the earth itself.
30 Nishat Colony. Bhopal -462003 (M.P.)
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