Re-learning medicine for another world

OHSU class teaches docs to provide the basics that Third World needs

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Apr 23, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

Dr. Amy Marr, right, an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine at OHSU, demonstrates intubating technique to Dr. Mal McAninch, who is taking an OHSU class on practicing international medicine.

COURTESY OF OHSU School of Medicine

The 3-inch skin ulcer on the ankle of the woman before her was like nothing Jenny MacNichol had ever seen before.

Alameda resident MacNichol had practiced internal medicine in Portland for a number of years before retiring a decade ago to spend more time with her children. But now the children were mostly grown, and MacNichol had decided to ease her way back into medicine by volunteering with a group of doctors from Providence Portland Medical Center who were providing free health care to agricultural workers in Central Guatemala.

The elderly Guatemalan woman explained that her wound had first appeared five years ago, and had never healed. And MacNichol knew almost immediately what it was – something called cutaneous leishmaniasis. “A very rare disease that you would not see in Portland,” MacNichol says. A tropical disease that, up until a few months ago, if she’d seen it, MacNichol would not have recognized.

But not this time. “It looked just like it had been described in class,” MacNichol says.

That class is one of Oregon Health & Science University’s latest, and a unique one at that, according to officials at the medical school there. Its focus is retraining physicians looking to become volunteers overseas through organizations such as Doctors Without Borders.

The class, which is really more of a 10-week program, was the brainchild of 66-year-old Salem ophthalmologist Andy Harris. Harris is semi-retired and had been thinking that he’d like to get involved with overseas volunteer work. But as an eye doctor decades out of medical school, he figured the skills he had been honing all these years were not the ones that would be most needed in some little village in Africa, Central America or South America.

Harris says he knows other doctors who are retired or close to retiring who also were interested in volunteer work, but uncertain if their training was adequate. Many were specialists like him, who knew that in Third World countries they would likely be practicing primary care.

Harris approached OHSU officials, who wanted evidence that there were enough Oregon doctors interested in the program.

So Harris sent a letter to every physician in Oregon between the ages of 46 and 69. More than 400 said they would like the training.

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