Skip to main content

Community Doctors - ELAM - Cuba's Latin American School of Medicine

Image
By
Have I mentioned that I am very proud of my country, Cuba? Probably, you guessed it from a different post. The latter was more about our cultural heritage, but there are other levels of our idiosyncrasy that make me really glad to be a Cuban. Some of these levels may be impossible to disentangle from politics, and in fact, they were (are?) boosted by it. I won't launch an ode to the System in Cuba, partially because I think it is full of important faults, but also because there are other objective realities beyond Ideology that one should be bold enough to confront as such. Cuba is well known for their doctors, their health care system, their participation in medical assistance missions around the globe (e.g., Haiti after the earthquake of 2010), as well as for their (free of charges) international school of Medicine for fellows willing to help poor communities back in their home countries. To grasp the essence of Cuban public health care system, you may consult certain indicators by means of the Gapminder toolkit (see Gapminder post), e.g., the comparative evolution of child mortality vs. income per person for Cuba and the US. 

Here you have a nice documentary on the "Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina" (ELAM), which hosts not only Latin Americans nowadays but lots of students with different nationalities, virtually from all around the world. I hope you find it interesting, and that it motivates some reflections since right now people is seeking for alternative and plural health care education.  


I finish with a script excerpt from the episode Human Error from House MD TV series. 

Chase: They were lost at sea for 3 days; maybe dehydration caused the kidney problems.

[Foreman is laughing at his emails, House walks in]

Cameron: And the double vision?

Chase: Concussion during the shipwreck.

Foreman: It all fits as long as these symptoms started when you think it started.

House: This would be a lot easier if we had her medical records. Any of you certified deep sea divers?

Chase: She's from a dirt poor country in the tropics, infectious disease and parasites are the most likely cause of unexplained pain, fever and skin rash, we might as well start there.

House: [takes off his cap and puts it on a model of a brain] If there's one thing Castro knows is how to look great in green. [he gives pointed looks in Foreman's direction but the duckling has his back to the rest of the room and doesn't seem to see] And if there are two things Castro knows is how to look great in green and train doctors. Even without the medical records, we can assume she was drowned in antibiotics before she risked drowning to see me.

Cameron: So what doesn't Castro know?

House: How to lay his hands on high-tech scanning equipment. [points to the list of symptoms on the board] Pain, double vision, point us towards the head. Cameron, get an MRI, see what's cooking in the old cabeza. [she goes out to do as asked] Chase, check out the husband.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Beauty and Consolation

By
Van de Schoonheid en de Troost or Of Beauty and Consolation is Dutch TV program hosted by Wim Kayzer and broadcasted in 2000. There are several reasons for me to recomend this tv series. First of all I like the title very much. The title is in itself consoling, says that there is somewhere or somehow the possibility of consolation (that for some reason I feel the need). The second reason is the music of the beginning of each episode. Then, of course, the interviews themselves, since they are long enough and free enough to allow these brilliant people to show a little bit of their work, of their personality, of their idiosyncrasies. And probably the nicest thing of the series is the diversity of the people interviewed, scientists, writers, philosophers, painters, some incredibly shy, some the opposite, some believe in ghosts, most don't, all in all an interesting catalog of the human species. The tv series ends with a show in which they gather many of the guests to discuss the...
2 comments
Read more

RSA Animate - Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us - Daniel Pink

By
RSA Animate is a collection of 10 min cartoon-like animations on a whiteboard that partners with a synthesis of a conference given by renown academics in RSA Events . This series is put forward by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), who aim at a 21st century enlightenment .  I first saw some of the short-film series while being in Cuba. I remember I was astonished by the amount of information they could compress in a 10 min talk. Then, I noticed that there was a great deal of post-processing after the 'natural' 30 min or so talk. Nonetheless, it is still amazing how they can manage to do it so smoothly. The animations deserve special attention. They are not only accompanying the talk but they actually supply complementary information, in terms of irony, cultural references, etc., while marking a step-by-step evolution of the speech in a better way than any slide show could do. Here is an RSA Animate example on "Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us", ...
1 comment
Read more

VSauce - How to count past infinity - Michael Stevens

By
VSauce is a youtube channel created by Michael Stevens, graduated from psychology and English literature and turned educator and Internet personality. In my opinion, nothing in Stevens's academic career, other than his insatiable curiosity and his tremendous discipline, could have ever been used to forecast the success of his enterprise of weekly scripting, directing and hosting high level youtube videos concerning a variety of topics, ranging from human to exact sciences. The quality of the videos had been increasing since the beginning of VSauce back in 2010, not only in its visual appeal but also in the script, didactics, and the selection of subjects. Now VSauce is as mature as any TV show or documentary. Furthermore, the episodes (videos?) are incredibly profound and often self-contained. Here you have a recent example. It is very accurate in its mathematical definitions and the proofs for each statement, while conveying the message to any sufficiently interested audience i...
1 comment
Read more