By Doug Brunk, San Diego Bureau
The first time Mark D. Dressner, M.D., joined a group of medical colleagues on a mission trip to Honduras in the early 1990s, he made house calls an hour and a half away from the group's base camp on horseback.
“I had never ridden a horse before, so that was an experience,” recalled Dr. Dressner, who is the inpatient director of the family medicine residency program at Memorial Hospital in Long Beach, Calif.
“We saw one patient with ascites and one with congestive heart failure. We had enough Lasix for only one and had to make an ethical choice. We also provided seizure medications to a mom who would seize and drop her baby in the process,” he said.
On another trip, Dr. Dressner and his medical teammates encountered a Honduran man who traveled 4 hours through the mountains to ask for their help. His wife had just given birth and was seizing. The medical team agreed to help, and the man traveled 4 hours home to get his wife.
“Then he and her brothers traveled back, carrying the woman in a hammock hanging from bamboo poles,” he said. “We were able to give her antibiotics—her temperature was off the thermometer—and we were able to semicontrol the seizures with Valium pills per rectum, which is the only possible medication we had. We were then able to find a truck to send her off to the big city for better care.”
Since 1992, Dr. Dressner has participated in 11 volunteer medical missions to Honduras and Brazil through a program out of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine called Hombro a Hombro, or Shoulder to Shoulder.
His interest in helping disadvantaged people in other countries dates back to his childhood when a Peace Corps worker paid a visit to his fourth-grade class to share her experiences.
“She did Corps work in Micronesia, and I always had these fantasies about doing that,” Dr. Dressner said.
He returns to Honduras this fall with a medical team that will include his mother, who is a retired nurse and has kept her nursing license active just for the trip.
“If every doctor in the United States volunteered 2 weeks of their time anywhere in the world, the world would be a really good place,” he said. “When you do volunteer work, it reminds you why you became a doctor to begin with.”
Of course, you don't have to step foot out of the country to use your physician skills to make a difference in other people's lives. Volunteering your medical skills in any capacity “enhances the satisfaction of having the privilege of being a physician, if you develop a mind-set that the community is your patient, and you get involved with your community,” noted Wayne C. Spiggle, M.D., an internist who lives with his wife on a farm in Short Gap, W. Va.
“If you do that, you will discover that there are a lot of like-minded people. Develop your coalition. Don't try to do something on your own.”
Dr. Spiggle practiced internal medicine full time for 33 years, but 6 years ago transitioned to part-time volunteer practice. He now spends the equivalent of 2 days per week working for a community health center in Cumberland, Md., as well as for a network of five community health centers in rural West Virginia.
He also employs his knowledge and influence as a member of the West Virginia Pharmaceutical Cost Management Council and as a council member of the West Virginia State Medical Association.
“Access to care for everyone has been a core issue for me for my entire medical career,” Dr. Spiggle said. “I think it's a national disgrace that we stand alone among industrialized countries, and we have the haves and the have-nots as far as our health care delivery is concerned.”
You might not think of Beaufort County, S.C., as a place of hardship. After all, it contains the popular retirement community of Hilton Head. But more than half the children who attend public schools in the county are in the subsidized school lunch program, “which means that they are in the lower economic groups,” said James Cerilli, M.D., a transplant surgeon who retired from the University of Rochester (N.Y.) in 1994 and moved to Hilton Head.
In 2003, he founded a not-for-profit organization called A Community Caring for Children, whose primary goal is to meet the dental needs of schoolchildren in the area. During various times throughout the year, a staff of dental professionals drives out to schools in a van equipped with dental gear. In 2004, they performed more than 11,000 procedures on 2,200 children.