I refer to the letter Medical degrees: Don't lower our standards . This letter reminds me of a family story concerning two distant relatives. Judging from their dismal performances throughout their school-lives and in the SPM exams, nobody in the family envisaged that a career in medicine awaited them both.

However, things turned out very differently than we ever imagined! The duo enrolled in a private college after SPM, completed the requisite pre-university programmes to do medicine and were accepted by a very popular medical college abroad. Of course, it wasn't cheap then either - each of them had to cough up about US$100,000. Today they are practicing GPs.

Now, I have always wondered why our neighbour, Singapore, has never bothered to recognise this medical college. Neither has Australia and New Zealand. These developed countries must have had very good reasons for deciding not to grant recognition. It would be insightful to find out what these reasons are.

On the other hand, Malaysia had no problems recognising the medical degree from this college which my two distant relatives graduated from..

It seems very puzzling, doesn't it? It appears that the criteria for evaluating whether a foreign medical degree from this particular college should be recognised is not as rigorous as that of Singapore, Australia or New Zealand's. The Malaysian government must have its own rationale for this apparent lack of stringency.

I can only hope and pray that my two relatives have been trained adequately in medical school skills and are competent doctors. Otherwise, as the writer said, we would have local doctors with differing skills. And that would be very disturbing to any patient seeking treatment for an ailment.