The most telling characteristic of the profession that is supposed to deliver health care is that doctors, as a group, appear to be sicker than the rest of society. Conservative counts peg the number of psychiatrically disturbed physicians in the U.S. at 17,000 or one in twenty, the number of alcoholics at more than 30,000, and the number of narcotics addicts at 3,500 or one per­cent.Indian statistics will not be any less alarming. A thirty-year study comparing doctors with professionals of similar socio-economic and intellectual status found that by the end of the study nearly half the doctors were divorced or unhappily mar­ried, more than a third used drugs such as amphetamines, barbitu­rates, or other narcotics, and a third had suffered emotional prob­lems severe enough to require at least ten trips to a psychiatrist. The control group of non-doctors didn’t fare nearly as badly.