A World We Dare to Imagine Pt. 3

Hye Unit

When I was in Cambodia, I learned that the number one cause of death for children was burns. I was shocked. There must have been a mistake. Certainly it was from malnutrition or malaria? I can't even remember the last time one of my friends suffered from a burn more severe than from a curling iron. How could this be? Unfortunately, in poorer nations where the population lives in slums, there tend to be large fire pits where women cook inside their huts. As a result, if a mother isn't looking her child may crawl into the fire and burn himself. If untreated, the burn can get infected and kill him. Burns result in the loss of 18 million disability adjusted years, and over 250,000 deaths a year in Africa alone.

I propose an organization called the Hye ("shih") Unit, a mobile clinic which specifically treats burns. In Asante Twi, one of the most spoken languages of Ghana, hye means burn. The World Health Organization (WHO) distinguished Ghana as one of the African countries with the most burn incidents. My clinic will be first made available there. This organization will also have an educational purpose. We will teach community leaders how to prevent burns from happening in the home, to overcome the culture barrier between me and the villagers.

Hye Unit will travel mostly to rural areas, as middle- and low-income households are affected the most by burns as reported by WHO. On board, we will have two nurses, a doctor specialized in burns, and a translator. These people can be rotated out, and volunteers are encouraged. The nurses will be able to educate the community leaders and explain to them how to prevent burns so they can relay the information back to their people. Ideally, I would also like to expand to India where men abuse their wives by pouring acid and burning their skin. This would require an additional educational program in which men are trained to treat women with respect, and women are empowered leave abusive relationships.

A World We Dare to Imagine

To make the world a better place, I feel like we would need to start with education. If there is one pillar of society I feel as if everyone needs to have access to, it is that one. Think about it. Where would you be if your parents had not enrolled you in kindergarten? What if you didn't graduate from high school? There is a reason schooling is required by law. To be honest, I feel that it's a crime that certain socioeconomic classes receive poorer education than others. If more people were educated, they would know how to sustain themselves better. They would have access to jobs and be able to support their families better. And when I say education, I don't mean traditional education. I think that the education you and I are used to does not work everywhere. When I was in Dakar, I met with the founder of Tostan, Molly Melching, and she had education programs tailored to the people she was serving. For example, there was one in which they taught women how to take care of family affairs (pay taxes, take out loans, etc...). I also know that there are certain NGOs that work with inmates in Senegalese prisons, teaching them how to get jobs and support themselves once they get out of prison. I believe that this type of education, an individualized curriculum rather than a one-size-fits-all program, would make the world a better place.

After education, I believe that the world needs universal healthcare. Too many children in poorer countries die from diseases that are preventable and treatable in the U.S. Healthcare should be free, and available to all. This means that many hospitals would have to be opened up all over the world. When I was in Ica, Peru, I met families who had traveled for over 48 hours to get to the hospital I was volunteering at. This is not uncommon. Unfortunately, for people living in rural areas the nearest hospital is hours away. What are they supposed to do if someone hits their head, or suffers a heart attack? Their loved one would never make it to the closest hospital. I understand that hospitals are costly, so we must have at least some sort of mobile clinic in these impoverished areas. Life is precious, and we must do everything we can to save it. 

Random Post 2

Anatomy

This semester I'm taking Meds 320: Cadaveric Human Anatomy. In this class, we are taught gross anatomy at USC Keck Medical School by the med school's first year Anatomy professor. Each week, we have lab in the cadaver lab at Keck, and we get to open up and look inside human bodies that have already been dissected by the medical students. What is interesting about these bodies is that the donors chose specifically to donate them to Keck, and therefore had to live within 50 miles of the medical school. Other medical schools get their donor bodies from a California state "donor bank", so their donors cannot choose which medical school will use them. Because all of the donors lived in Southern California,  their lungs have some black coloring from tar inhaled while living here. I know it's not something nice to think about, but if we were to live here our whole lives, we would end up with the same discoloring because of the smog that covers Los Angeles.

This class has been extremely interesting, and I look forward to visiting the lab each week. In the lab, our professor receives teaching assistance from first and second year medical students. It is also fun to interact with them and learn what daily life in medical school is. Each week I'm amazed at how much they know, and how they're able to differentiate everything in the body. Sometimes when we look in the donors' bodies, it's very hard for me to see the difference between a nerve and a vein, unless I look at their starting and end points. For them, they can just look at it and know automatically what structure it is. Although a difficult class, Meds 320 has been one of my favorite classes at USC.

Our professor also gives us a lot of opportunities to be in the lab more if we want to be. This past Monday, I helped him dissect ears. Basically, I had to knock of the top of the temporal bone in a donor's skull with a chisel and hammer in order to see the donor's middle ear. It was much harder than it sounds! The temporal bone is the strongest bone in our body, so I had to hit the chisel several times before it even budged a little. In the end I dissected three ears successfully, and was able to keep the stapes (one of our three tiny middle ear bones) intact in each of them. It was such a fun learning experience and made me look forward to my first year of Anatomy in medical school when I'll be able to dissect much more than just an ear!