The Medical Mission

There are clinics and hospitals throughout the city of Cusco but much like here, healthcare is not always affordable or accessible. There are nurses who serve as the primary provider in some areas. In other areas, the doctors do everything from taking taking vitals, gathering the history, to performing the exam. At my placement site, I worked primarily with the obstetrician. The first thing that I noticed was the large amount of paperwork required to be completed. They have a program similar to our government health insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid. They are not financially capable of processing information through electronic means so the paperwork to be filled out for their government program and their medical documentation system is extensive. While the doctor filled out paperwork, she requested that I get the vitals for her patients. Most patients were expecting a child but others were not. I measured their height and weight and calculated their pulse and blood pressure. The doctor would feel certain areas of the mother's stomach with her hand and ask me to do the same. She would explain to me where the anatomical parts of the baby were inside of the patient's stomach. I think emergency medicine and surgery are cool but this experience with the obstetrician opened up a new interest I never knew I had. We would find the baby's heart beat with the fetal Doppler. However the equipment was very basic and you could only detect a heart beat. The mothers generally are not aware of the sex of the baby until the baby is born. I learned after my experience with the obstetrician that medicine is probably much more vast than what I can ever imagine and at many different levels, one can most definitely have a strong contribution to medicine.