Tropical Medicine and Global Health is pretty much as it sounds. We’ve learned a lot about the Costa Rican health care system which makes me realize just how much I don’t know about it in the US. Although learning about tropical diseases like cholera, malaria, TB, soil transmitted helminths, etc. can be at moments unpleasant it’s fascinating and useful information that I can (although hopefully won’t have to unless I’m working as a healthcare professional) apply to real life situations. It also makes us aware of potential health hazards that we might not have worried about before- like getting parasites from walking barefoot or being bit by a chagas bug while sleeping in sub-standard wooden housing.
The ethnobiology course relates somewhat to my interest in traditional medicine systems but it has opened my eyes to issues in ethnomedicine that I was never aware of. Bioprospecting is probably the largest topic I had never given much thought to. I’ve always thought that many complementary or alternative treatments haven’t been sufficiently investigated and have felt that scientific research has a hard time acknowledging the interactions that multiple plant compounds used in conjunction might have, but I never considered what would happen if treatments were proven to be effective. Do the traditional knowledge holders get compensation and if so in what form? Are communities exploited in order to obtain useful species? Also, I never really gave serious thought to the treatments that may be found through non-plant species such as fungi, insects or animals. A lot of the classes fall under the category of what I would consider medical anthropology. We’ve discussed how local healers or shamans may be able to work with providers of the system we are accustomed to. For example, in one culture, oral rehydration therapy for children with diarrhea was considered bad because of humoral classifications but if people who understood the traditional beliefs could slightly modify the ORT recipe it may be able to become acceptable to the local people.
The research practicum course has involved many more lectures than I anticipated and is probably the driest component, but maybe (big question mark) it’ll be useful in the future. We turn in observations for all our field trips and have done some mini projects. For the actual practicum part I’m working with three others on a project that has us comparing the composition and structure of indigenous and non-indigenous medicinal gardens in the southwestern portion of Costa Rica. This is the final portion of the program. This week we’re collecting data in order to present our findings and write our paper next week.
The field trips we have taken have related to all three courses. It’s been a neat way to familiarize ourselves with the country. We’ve visited a number of indigenous territories, EBAISes, a hospital, banana and pineapple plantations, a water purification plant and an infectious diseases lab (perhaps other places that aren’t coming to mind right now). It makes me wish that I knew what comparable places were like in the U.S.
There are three other rather large components of our course. These are projects that we research and present to the class.
The first is Plants- we research a local plant family and group and present it to the class. Since mostly everyone here is premed and not ecology majors this tends to be the most dreaded subject. It’s interesting to learn some random facts though. For example cacao, marshmallow, and cola (as in coca cola) are all in the same family (Malvaceae if you were curious).
The second is something called Know Your World where we present on the health care systems of other countries. This is really fascinating information but I don’t feel like I’ve retained that much from the presentations earlier on in the semester. Even after having an hour lecture on the Costa Rican system it took me a while and many visits to the local clinics to really internalize how the system works. I presented on Canada though which I really enjoyed and I think I got a lot from it. It’s more similar to the US than I thought in that the doctors don’t work for the government and the system varies depending on the province. We’ll be learning about France tomorrow.
The third is Journal Club. This is where we’re divided in partners, choose a topic related to medicine, have our classmates read a few articles on the subject and then discuss it for an hour. We’ve had issues ranging from medical tourism, sex ed, medical tv shows, obesity, etc. It’s really interesting to hear everyone’s opinions and different experiences since many of them have had a fair bit of exposure to health care in the US and elsewhere and have taken related classes at their colleges.
No comments:
Post a Comment