PHRee Medicine

I went to a small village in the West Bank the other day with a mobile clinic that the group Physicians for Human Rights-Israel operates. The mobile clinic is basically a small busload of physicians, nurses, and students that provide very basic medical care to Palestinians who do not have access to routine health care.

A few other students and I met the rest of the group at a gas station near the border. We then boarded a bus and rode for about an hour to the village where the clinic would be.

The "clinic" was actually a school house and patients were seen in classrooms that were about the size of a bedroom. There were a few internal medicine rooms, a couple pediatrician rooms, one orthopedics room, and a room where the medicine was distributed. I was in one of the internal medicine rooms.

Besides being very crude medicine, the whole dynamic of the patient visits was really interesting. In my room there was the physician who spoke Hebrew and English. There were the patients who only spoke Arabic. There was me who struggles with English. And there was another very impressive student who was fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. When he wasn't translating for the doctor and patient, he was helping me understand a little better what was going on.

It seemed like we saw around four thousand patients in about 5 hours. I think the number was closer to 25 though.

Afterwards, we were bussed over to a local restaurant where we were fed a colorful and much-needed meal.

There are some mixed feelings among my classmates about the PHR organization. Many disagree with its political agenda and believe that it inappropriately mixes politics and medicine. I prefer to keep my distance from political debates. Particularly in this country. But I know I saw some talented and caring people doing good things for good people, many of them children, and I don't see how one can argue with that.