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What's New ?
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International
Health Missions
by Steven D. Bevier
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MSUCOM faculty members have gone to extraordinary lengths to take their expertise and their caring to those in need. Guatemala has been at the center of these efforts as several D.O.s have made trips to the Central American nation in recent years. They have covered many different areas of the country and they have performed many different services, but the reason they go is always the same: a desire to help people.
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Dr. Gardner & Dr. Willyerd
Tressa Gardner, D.O., (Class of ‘94) and Gary Willyerd, D.O., (Class of ‘78) are in charge of medical education at Pontiac Osteopathic Hospital. Last February, they led a team of 22 osteopathic interns to Guatemala. For two weeks, they worked in two small communities lacking regular medical care and treated more than 3,700 patients for a wide variety of ailments.
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Not only were the clinics beneficial for the communities, but it was a valuable learning experience for the interns. With no expensive diagnostic tools or lab tests, the young doctors had to rely on their clinical skills to assess patients. The trip was such a success that another is planned for 2004, and Dr. Gardner and Dr. Willyerd hope to make international health a regular clinical rotation at P.O.H.
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Donald Bartkowski, D.O., is a member of the osteopathic surgical specialties department at MSUCOM. For the last three years, he has been part of a team that travels to Guatemala to perform various procedures that wouldn’t otherwise be available in this underprivileged country. The group is organized through the Michigan/Ohio chapter of “Healing the Children.” Dr. Bartkowski and his fellow doctors must bring all the equipment and supplies they need with them. They spend two to three days evaluating children who had been previously identified as surgical candidates by local doctors. Then the team – two pediatric urologists and two anesthesiologists with other nurses and assistants – sets up a schedule and over the next week performs as many as 60 surgeries to correct a wide assortment of ailments.
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Dr. Bartkowski
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Dr. Everett
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John Everett, D.O., (Class of ’87) is a family practitioner in Indian River, Michigan. He has gone on two medical missions to Guatemala and has traveled to some of the most remote regions of the country, including some small villages that had never seen a doctor before he arrived. While Dr. Everett treats what patients he can, the mission emphasizes improving quality of life by helping the villages get clean water or plant fruit-bearing trees.
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Dr. Morath
Margaret Morath, D.O., (Class of ‘75) has been in MSUCOM’s pediatrics department for over eight years, and in that time she has traveled on eight international missions. Her trips are coordinated by DOCARE International, a group founded by an osteopathic physician in the early 1960s. DOCARE is completely staffed by volunteers and organizes missions all over Central and South America.
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Dr. Morath has taken several trips to Guatemala where she treats patients in various remote locations, helping the ones she can and finding referral options for the more serious cases. She has also supervised MSUCOM medical students who have volunteered to join her on the missions. |
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