Community Spotlight
Medical Students At Work Abroad
The Organization of International Health (OIH), a student-run organization at the School of Medicine, works to raise awareness of international health issues. This summer, Stanford students are contributing to projects in communities around the globe. Whether helping devise new preventive strategies, gaining hands-on clinical experience or conducting field research, these individuals are already distinguishing themselves as advocates for improved health care worldwide. Here is just a sampling of their work.
Lisa J Wong
Second-year medical student
Rio Blanco, Mexico
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Wong (right) and a nurse on a home visit in Orizabab, Mexico. | |
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My traveling med scholars project studies the mutation and transmission of the oral poliovirus vaccine, which is no longer administered in the U.S. On a daily basis, this means I am recruiting participants and collecting fecal material from infants and their family members, which contains the poliovirus that we are studying. I will bring these samples back to the lab of Professor Yvonne Maldonado for further study. I live in the city of Orizaba and work in an area of Mexico that is rural and beautiful. I haven´t seen anyone else who looks remotely like a tourist and I haven´t seen a single postcard sold anywhere. People are very friendly and curious about where I´m from. Yesterday with my host family I watched Mexico win its first major soccer match against Argentina in the Americas Cup; it was quite exciting to watch it together with proud Mexicans.
Sam Rice-Townsend
Second-year medical student
Inbitubca, Honduras
I´m working on a Chagas eradication project, a collaborative effort involving the Honduras government, WorldVision and a Japanese group called JICA. I´ve been working in the mountains a few hours outside of La Esperanza where the prevalence of El Mal de Chagas is highest. Chagas is a sleeper disease that kills people 15 or 20 years after they are infected. It is transmitted by specific insects that live in the thatched roof or cracked adobe walls. For this reason, the transmission of the disease is closely related to poverty and I have been working in some of the poorest areas of an already destitute country. It has been difficult to accept the realities of this place, but also inspiring to see the way the government, NGOs and the afflicted communities are working together to eliminate the disease. Most of the effort is toward eliminated the vector insect by rebuilidng houses and spraying. I have been working with the epidemiologic arm of the project, going around and testing children for the disease. This is no small task when the child you are trying to find lives 3.5 hours away by foot (there are no roads, electricity)...so I´ve had lots of time to enjoy the mountains to the census list. As of Thursday, we had found all but one in the entire area! This week we are doing education in the schools, making sure the children know about the disease and what the vector insect looks like.
Phuoc V. Le
Fourth-year medical student
Lhasa, Tibet
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Le (far right) discusses perinatal strategies with Tibetan mothers and health advocates. | |
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I am starting my 3rd week now and so far the pace of gaining new experiences has not shown any sign of slowing. Half my time here is spent on a research project sponsored by Stanford Medical School. For this project I collaborate with a local non-governmental organization (OneHEART) to use a community-participatory model to find out how best to tailor educational interventions on the village level. That is, I try to let the people who live and work in the community tell us how they can improve their own maternal and perinatal outcomes. It's a bottom-up approach instead of the traditional top-down approach to public health. I'm still just in the beginning stages of this study and hope that it will develop into a useful intervention for the 40,000 people of Medrogonkar County, Tibet. The other half of my time is spent on the NIH trial to test a traditional Tibetan medicine versus a western biomedicine to help women bleed less after delivering their babies. This project continues to challenge my research and managerial skills, especially working in a trilingual environment. The rewards have truly exceeded my expectations, particularly the friendships with my colleagues in the office.
Bryan Maxwell
Second-year medical student
New Delhi, India
I have been spending a few weeks here at All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), which is by most accounts India's most prestigious medical school and public teaching hospital. My time here has been informal and unpaid (not through Med Scholars or any other Stanford or AIIMS programs). Through contacts at Stanford, I connected with an attending physician, a pediatric nephrologist, who agreed to host me. He has been an extremely generous and engaging host. Most days, I sit with him in general peds clinic or go on rounds with him and his residents in the morning, then sit in either his peds nephrology clinic or another pediatric subspecialty clinic. On other days, I've gone to a private hospital and a rural community health center. I've also gotten to sit in on Surgery clinic and rounds and go on rounds in the PICU and NICU. Physicians all speak English, but patients by and large do not, so much of my day is spent listening to exchanges in Hindi. I've been surprised at how much I can follow, not by listening to the words, but just by watching the exchanges, the body language, and the children's faces. My physical exam skills have gotten much better; there's no time for me to use an interpreter here, as each patient in a general clinic gets only about 5-10 minutes and I see a huge volume of patients and have come across quite a few diseases I wouldn't get to see very much at home like malaria and TB. Most of all, my experience has taught me how much of medicine isn't scientific, or even verbal. So much of it is about being in a room with someone who is ill, about listening, observing, and witnessing. In a strictly medical sense, I've done very little for these patients. Most of the time, I haven't understood, literally speaking, a word they've said. But in a less technical sense, I hope I'm right that just being interested and present has been for them, at least, something. It certainly has been for me.
Pavan Kasi Bendapudi
Second-year medical student
Cairo, Egypt
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Bendapudi enjoying a free moment at the Citadel in Cairo. | |
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I'm currently working at the World Health Organization's Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean (WHO-EMRO) in Cairo, Egypt. I'm in the Tuberculosis Control Unit, where we're focusing on helping countries in the region better monitor and evaluate their anti-tuberculosis efforts through the use of both standard and customized indicatators. Cairo has been a great experience, but I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't also a major culture shock. So far, I've seen the Pyramids of Giza, Cairo's famous Citadel, and walked along the Nile at its wider points, which can be quite breathtaking.
Related Sites:
Organization of International Health (OIH)
Posted: 8/2/2004
