A hospital is often seen as a sanctuary—a bubble of refuge for local and migrant populations alike. However, in order for a hospital to provide care, it needs to rely on a health care system that governs daily operational functions and establishes rules and regulations to care. As an Egyptian-American licensed physician assistant (PA) in the United States currently conducting a clinical trial and an educational research curriculum in Bahrain, I have had a chance to reflect on the major differences, successes, and downfalls of ...

I entered the Brighton Marine Public Health Center in Massachusetts in December 1981, where hundreds of Indochinese refugees were being medically screened after the fall of Saigon. I’ll never forget my first patient—a middle-aged Cambodian woman with major hearing loss. During the exam, she told me that her hearing loss began after being beaten unconscious by the Khmer Rouge soldiers and left for dead on a pile of the bodies of her relatives. At the time, I knew nothing about the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. I had no training on the impact of extreme violence on ...

When my fellow Harvard Medical School classmates asked “what I was up to,” I called it my Rural Family Medicine Adventure Month. More formally, it was my extreme privilege and pleasure to learn Family Medicine across northern Maine and western Massachusetts as part of an independent study in rural primary care in June 2021. My travels brought me to the Jackman Community Health Center, the Northern Maine Medical Center, the Barre Family Health Center, the Behavioral Health Network Methadone Clinic, and the Community Health Center of Franklin County. I explored the ...

In many ways, medical school trains its pupils to be detectives, capable of discerning and interpreting even the most subtle physical signs of the human body. Yet, when patients are so generous as to entrust us with their stories, as illustrated by their verbal or body language, we often lack the skills – those akin to literary analyst – to elucidate motifs and themes that could both explain and perhaps facilitate the patient’s relationship to their health and the healthcare system. The ...

Broken can often be healed. A fall, a thunderous crash, the screech of fragments flying in many directions. Find the pieces, line them back up again, stick them together somehow, and voila. Sometimes it doesn’t hold, sometimes it takes a long time for the adhesive to fully set, but at some point the pieces come back together. Not quite the same as before, but not so far off either. What is to be done, however, with brittleness? Shattering with a puff of a breeze, breaking in two, leaking salt water with no more force than a gaze. Moving further and ...

Author: Caroline Barnaby, MLA “Your dad was feeling dizzy today after a dip in the ocean. He thinks he might be experiencing vertigo from swimmer’s ear,” remarked my mum during our weekly phone conversation. “I’m going to schedule an appointment with his doctor, just in case.” It was the summer of 2018, and my dad had just retired after a 42-year career as an elementary school physical education teacher for ...

My patient sat back in her chair, shoulders curled forward over her substantial belly, two canes leaning against the counter next to her. “No, doctor, I need you to say that you WILL make this happen, not that you will ‘try’. Can you say that?” It was an uncomfortable moment. As a physician I am not used to having my words dictated to me, and I did not take to it very well. She was about to be released from rehabilitation, recovering from surgery. She usually lives in her own home, by herself, but with a support team due to her serious mental and ...