Making a difference- one doctor's way
Becoming a physician requires commitment. Commitment to hard work, study , becoming a lifelong learner. Commitment to do no harm, to place the needs of others as the highest priority. 
The opportunities to use a medical degree are as limitless as ones imagination. There are the obvious choices of office or hospital practice. There are small towns, big cities, academic opportunities to teach or do research. There are executive opportunities such as I have pursued, to make changes in the system to improve care for larger groups of patients than can be affected one at a time.
Dr. Michael Polifka, after leaving his primary care practice in Manchester due to medical disability, made a decision to make a difference by volunteering on international medical missions. Following is an excerpt of his words about this experience:
We are anchored several miles offshore here in Guatemala and travel to one of three different sites each day. There are surgeons (doing pre-op screening for elective surgeries on the ship in the up coming days), physicians of varied medical specialties, nurses, nurse practitioners, nurse educators, midwives, dentists. dental hygienists, optometrists, pharmacists and a batch of Navy Seabees (doing special construction projects). Each clinic site is packed, literally thousands of patients waiting to be seen each day; marginally organized chaos. I am doing general medicine, seeing pretty much anyone that comes in for a medical problem.
In the community clinics in Livingston and Morales, I am seeing the usual complement of poverty related illnesses, including intestinal parasites, asthma and aches and pains (from living a hard life). The clinic at the national hospital in Puerto Barrios is a bit different. Here patients have come from far and wide around the country to be seen for consultations for possible to medical treatments and technology not available to anyone outside of North America and Europe. There are lots of little successes, the simple medical interventions that will surely make patients better, albeit for a short time. And there are some of the impressive interventions; one of the surgeons, a fellow Project HOPE volunteer, saw a Mayan woman who walked 240 km over the prior 15 days to get here and arrange to repair her abdominal hernia on the ship (one of the seventy surgeries that will be done while the ship is in Guatemala).
Frustratingly, there are too many that we are unable to help either because of lack of technology, time in the country, or hours in a day; but never for lack of caring or personal effort by virtually everyone on the Comfort. There is a 45 year old mother of 5 children with a damaged heart valve that is beyond the surgical capacity of the ship; an 8 year old boy unable to walk from congenital contractures of the tendons in his legs that won’t be repaired as the operating room schedule for the time we are here is over filled. There is the 51 year-old father of three with the uncontrollable shaking and stiffness to the point of near immobility of Parkinson’s disease who needs a life time of medicines readily available in the U.S. but we don’t have with us. There is the 32 year old agricultural engineer, who has been treated for leukemia; he flies across the country from the capital to ask me to arrange a bone marrow transplant in the U.S. And there are the hundreds who will receive only a small or partial supply of medicine as we run out by the middle of each afternoon being overwhelmed by the number of people who come to each of the clinics.
I remain incredibly touched by the individual expressions of thanks; the smiles, the hugs, the prayers given. But I experienced something new on this trip. On the first day in Morales, I happened to be the first one off the bus and the first to reach the wall of people, a couple of thousand at least. As I said “Buenas dias” to those in earshot, there was a simultaneous chorus greeting back. At the back edge of the crowd, the wall quietly opened for us to pass, and then they spontaneously started to applaud. The lump in my throat was heavy as I fought back tears. And it was immediately apparent to me for all the people that we saw and even the thousands that we didn’t, we, from the wealthiest country in the world, came and showed them, the poor people of the world, that we cared. So perhaps sometimes the most important thing you can do is just to show up ... And the world will be a little better for it.
