The responses of your readers to the Edmund Terrence Gomez affair ring a plaintive cry, unearthing the truth of the rot in Malaysian academia. For many non-bumiputera Malaysians, the Gomez discourse in malaysiakini provides a source of vindication and ventilation of accumulated frustration - but probably nothing more.

For the discourse to make any sense some 'higher power' must sit up and not only take note, but find the political will to act on these revelations. Malaysians can only live on in hope that at least in some spheres of life, they may witness a sea change in policy in their lifetimes.

Similarly frustrating push factors have created an internal drain of critical medical expertise from teaching institutions and government hospitals to the private sector. A cursory glance at the names of medical faculty deans and heads of medical departments throughout the country will confirm the claim.

If the drivers behind the Gomez debacle are applied to the world of medical training, the picture ought to provoke much more than an airing of non-bumi grievances. It should instead cause much anxiety that the minds and experience of many seniors in the medical profession are inaccessible to Malaysian trainees.

These trainees are the future doctors that one day will be delivering our babies, operating on our prostates and helping to keep us going till full life-expectancy years are reached.

Academically sequestered in private hospitals, private doctors are locked in to a system of 'cari makan' medical practice and have effectively been denied the opportunity to train the next generations of physicians. This is a waste and a shame. Medical training after all derives much from the model of apprenticeship and mentoring relationships.

Much can be done to tap this pool of talent. Private sector specialists and family physicians should be welcomed to public hospitals and compensated reasonably. Bureaucratic and professional hurdles should be streamlined to facilitate this process.

Private hospitals should be used as teaching centres on a formal rather than on an ad hoc basis once ethical issues are ironed out.

Rather than regard the private medical sector as the murky underworld of healthcare in Malaysia, the public medical sector should engage creatively with it for purposes of training as well as service provision.