"Like previous years, the main theme of the conference is to remain to bring awareness to the medical fraternity and the wider section of the society about extreme importance of general medicine specialists and not just the super specialist," Dr. Purakayastha said.

Focusing on healthcare issues afflicting India, Peerless Hospital and B.K. Roy Foundation, Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and West Bengal chapter of the Association of Physicians of India have jointly hosted the fourth edition of Medicon International 2017 conference here.

"Medicon International, an international conference on advanced clinical medicine, enters its fourth year. Royal College of Physicians of London was the organizing partner on first two occasions and the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh has been the co-host of this event in 2016 and this year," Dr. Sujit Kar Purakayastha said.

The health experts said that a large number of Indian patients generally select their own specialists, basing on his primary symptoms, and it might result a dud sometimes.

"In India, the choice to visit a doctor is usually made by a patient or the relatives based on the individual's symptoms. In this practice, there is a possibility that the patient may end up visiting a wrong specialist," Dr. Purakayastha said.

"In clinical practice, where there are considerable overlap of symptoms between different specialities, there is a high probability of investigation and treatment bias resulting in delay in arriving at a correct diagnosis and therefore receiving the right treatment, " the senior expert added. "Medicon International is aimed to build a bridge between this gap and to bring about the current unifying knowledge in different sub specialities."

The organizers said that most important disease burden in Europe and UK is in relation to the very advancing age while in the USA, the burden is from non communicable diseases like cancer, heart diseases and stroke.

"In the developing world, we still have to deal with infectious diseases but we also have our fair share of non-communicable diseases and age related illness," Dr. Sujit Kar Purakayasthat said. "Researches from the pharmaceutical industry, mostly based in the affluent west, are concentrated in developing solutions more essential to those countries."

"There are so many deaths in India from malaria and drug resistant tuberculosis. We haven't been able to find out a good solution for either of them so far," he added.

The medical expert claimed that India's health parameters are worse than its neighbouring countries Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

"There are attempts to politicize issues instead of finding out a proper solution when a major epidemic strikes," Dr. Purakayastha told the media.

"In our state, we have recently noticed a lot of turmoil within the medical profession. There has been an uncomfortable and unpleasant development where the trust between doctor and patients has severely eroded," he added.

Talking about recent dengue outbreak in the state, the senior physician said, "Recently, there has been an outbreak of Dengue in West Bengal while there have also been a significant number of febrile illness where no cause was found."

"At Peerless Hospital, 7 deaths were recorded due to Dengue this year while 4 others died of scrub typhus. Dengue and scrub typhus strikes were more in 2017 than last year," Dr. Purakayastha said.

However, the two-day long international conference, which started on Saturday, will be concluded on Sunday.

(Reporting by Deepayan Sinha)