Home
/
international health

Tag: international health

“Doctor Sahib, Mamnoon!”

Mariam Baloch October 11, 2024 8 Comments

Growing up in Pakistan, I aspired to be a doctor. I was fascinated by movies and TV shows centered on the medical profession and the day-to-day work and lives of physicians. To me, they were superheroes, wearing white coats instead of capes.

A familiar figure in the panoply was the stereotypically brilliant and successful physician/surgeon. (Remember Dr. Melendez in The Good Doctor?) Insanely smart and talented, he was also hard-edged, competitive and almost robotic in his laser-sharp focus on reaching diagnoses and treating symptoms.

Observing similar traits among my mentors while in medical school and during my internship, I concluded that while perfect politeness is the norm, feeling or displaying emotion must be atypical.

A Time to Die?

Jeff Carnett February 23, 2024 13 Comments

I’ve always liked this hospital. It’s small, just two stories, with natural light flooding through the rain-cleansed windows.

My patient Ruby is on the ground-level medical ward. The ward’s Maori name, Muiriwai, means “confluent point of two streams.” Each ward has a Maori name and four beds. There are no private rooms in this public hospital.

Ruby is lucky to have a bed near the window.

Total Immersion

Alison Heru January 5, 2024 5 Comments

Winter 1979

After my first ever transatlantic flight, my plane touches down at Kingston Airport, Jamaica. As we taxi towards the gate, I think back on the events leading up to this moment.

Earlier this year, I’d resolved to leave my native Scotland. Two years out of medical school, having done my internship and three stints as a locum in several specialties, I still had no idea for my future. I wrote to hospitals from Singapore to Mauritius to the island of St. Helena, asking about openings for a junior doctor. Medicine was my ticket into the world, to adventure, to finding my path in life.

“ACCEPTED FOR JOB STOP START IMMEDIATELY STOP,” said the telegram from the University of West Indies Hospital in Jamaica.

Going the Extra Mile

Zacheus W. Mbiri April 2, 2021 9 Comments

August 2018
Western Kenya

One morning, in the women’s ward of a semirural hospital where I was working as a family-medicine resident, my team encountered a rarity: a disabled forty-year-old lady with crutches. Her case seemed to scream for attention, and I made my way to her bed.

The Kiss

Todd Farnsworth December 25, 2020 11 Comments

The year is 2015, and I’m on my thirteenth surgical mission, but my first to Venezuela. I am a plastic surgeon, traveling with a nonprofit that offers free plastic surgery for people with birth defects such as cleft lip. We’re making a two-week visit to the coastal city of Cumaná, 250 miles east of Caracas.

Halfway through our first day of surgery, I’m asked to come out to the waiting area to assess a young girl named Vanessa, whose mother has brought her as a walk-in patient.

“Crisis Care” at the Border

Elena Hill December 18, 2020 3 Comments

In the time of COVID-19, healthcare workers are stepping up to care for massive numbers of patients. Often, they’re doing this without adequate resources. At the beginning of the pandemic, our hospital administration referred to this as “crisis standard of care”–which the US Institute of Medicine defines as “a substantial change in…the level of care it is possible to deliver, made necessary by a pervasive or catastrophic disaster.”

For many American doctors this model of care is new, but I would argue that for most health workers worldwide, it isn’t new at all.

This Is Why

H. Lee Kagan May 29, 2020 3 Comments

February 2016
Tierra Nueva, Dominican Republic

I’m in the last of five days caring for patients at rural clinics in western DR, along the Haitian frontier.

Tierra Nueva, miles from anywhere, is a collection of clapboard shanties and shacks scattered along a dusty, unpaved road that dead-ends at the border. People survive here by coaxing vegetables out of the earth via scratch farming. The lucky ones have a goat and maybe some hens.

Vision Quest

Alex Altman April 11, 2020 6 Comments

After finishing my third-year clinical rotations in medical school, I was feeling sleep-deprived and stressed out. The problem, I finally realized, was the ridiculous amount of pressure I’d put on myself to impress my attending physicians and get good grades.

My father is an ophthalmologist and cornea/cataract specialist. After routinely rejecting his career advice throughout my undergraduate years, I’d entered medical school–and, to my father’s delight, found myself increasingly fascinated by his field.

Finding the Words

Theresa Weinman November 1, 2019 10 Comments

“So how was your trip?” ask well-meaning friends and coworkers when I return from a medical mission to Engeye Health Clinic, in rural Uganda. Even years after my first trip there, trying to find the perfect words to describe it is a challenge.

I have been involved with Engeye since its founding, more than a decade ago. As the administrative coordinator with Albany Medical College’s department of family and community medicine, I helped a second-year medical student, Stephanie Van Dyke, and a faculty member, Dr. Bob Paeglow, put together a medical-mission trip to the small Ugandan village of Ddegeya. The clinic was to be managed by a visionary accountant named John Kalule (born in Ddegeya) and staffed by visiting US physicians. My role was to

All I Could Do

Leigh B. Grossman April 5, 2019 10 Comments

Leigh B. Grossman ~

The clinic in rural Haiti is a small stucco building with no electricity or running water. The temperature inside the clinic is 103 degrees, and there is no breeze. The examining-room walls are only seven feet high and afford no privacy.

This is my fourteenth trip to Haiti as a volunteer pediatrician. My twenty-fifth patient of the morning is a three-month-old infant named Joceylyn Marquee, who is completely swaddled in a dirty blanket and is carried in by her mother, Lucie.

In our tiny cubicle, Lucie sits with Joceylyn on her lap. The interpreter, Fredeson, and I are also seated. We’re all so close together that our knees touch. The acrid smell of human dirt, sweat and anxiety

Why Aren’t You Depressed?

Tess Timmes October 6, 2017 2 Comments

Tess Timmes ~

“Please walk slowly,” cautioned Sunita, my interpreter, as I crept down the stony switchback trail towards the rural Nepali village of Dhulikhel. Sunita, in her petite navy ballet flats, hopped down the rocks as easily as the speckled goats grazing nearby.

Emboldened by her speed, I stepped along eagerly, only to catch my size-ten neon running sneaker on a root and splat face-first into the dust. Looking up, I saw four women standing outside their clay-walled homes, their hands pressed to their mouths, their eyes sparkling with stifled laughter. Talk about making an entrance….

After finishing my third year of medical school, I was taking a year off to pursue my masters degree in public health. Through my research

It Takes a Tokyo Village

Ruth Harimoto June 23, 2017 12 Comments

Ruth Harimoto

I have lived in Japan for more than half of my life. I first came here as a nine-year-old child, the daughter of a missionary. Later, after several years of study and work in the US, I returned as an adult with my Japanese husband. You’d think that after more than thirty years here, I could almost call myself Japanese! But no. In this homogeneous country, I’m still a foreigner.

The role of a foreigner in Japan is, for the most part, a comfortable one. Japanese people are polite. They don’t expect foreigners to know Japanese, so when I do speak it (with my learned-as-a-child accent), I’m applauded and praised. This role can also be lonely, though.

As I go about

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: international health

“Doctor Sahib, Mamnoon!”

A Time to Die?

Total Immersion

Going the Extra Mile

The Kiss

“Crisis Care” at the Border

This Is Why

Vision Quest

Finding the Words

All I Could Do

Why Aren’t You Depressed?

It Takes a Tokyo Village

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: international health

Start typing and press enter to search