Daily Times

In its continuous anti-quackery campaign during the last two weeks, the Punjab Healthcare Commission has conducted raids on 1,340 treatment centres in 25 cities and sealed 157 quackery outlets.

As per details, the raids were carried out on almost all types of healthcare establishments (HCEs) including hospitals, laboratories and aesthetic centres.

Out of these, businesses were found to have changed on 325 fake centres. Moreover, 703 centres have been put under surveillance to check any attempt to restart quackery since qualified persons were running these centres at the time of raids. In Lahore, a maximum number of 15 fake treatment centres were closed down, which were Iqbal Medical Centre, Sindhu Clinic, Imtiaz Clinic, Beauty Perfections, Sheikh Clinic, Muhammad Iqbal Medical and General Store, Hanif Clinic, Ch Tariq Dental Surgery, Shafique Clinic, Naseer Dental Care Centre, Zahra Clinic and Maternity Centre, Tanveer Clinic, Alamgir Homoeopathic Clinic, Shaikh Clinic and Masood Pharmacy.

The number of shuttered centres in other cities included 14 each in Sheikhupura and Hafizabad; 11 each in Sargodha, Rawalpindi, Jhelum and Multan; 7 each in NankanaSahab and Dera Ghazi Khan; 6 each in Attock and Narowal; 5 in Khanewal; four each in Bhakkar, Toba Tek Singh, Lodharan, Bahawalpur and Bahawalnagar; 3 each in Faisalabad, Kasur and Sialkot; two each in Mianwali, Okara and Chakwal; and one in Gujrat. These comprised a large number of clinical and diagnostic laboratories, which were neither registered with the PHC nor employed qualified persons. The rest, among the sealed centres, were quacks posing as general physicians, maternity homes, hakeems, homoeopathic doctors, opticians, dentists and bone-setters.

A spokesperson of the commission also added that, so far, the PHC hadraided over 105,000 treatment centres as per the census and shuttered 34,019 quackery outlets, while around 25,000 quacks had been found to have quit their businesses. app