Volume V, Issue 1 :: April 2011

Hello Everyone!!

I just finished the third trip to Guatemala since January. I had three teams join me from Synergy Medical of Saginaw, Michigan. Each team consisted of 5 medical residents and one attending physician. The teams were excellent, caring, compassionate and cooperative.

I think they had a great time.

We treated around 2400 patients during the three trips. Each day we would travel by boat first and then hike to a village to set up a clinic.

We have visited all these villages in the past and are observing some improvement in overall community health.

We spend most of our time treating the children for scabies and secondary skin lesions associated with it, but also head lice, intestinal worms and other acute problems.

We also treat the children's parents for everything from chronic bronchitis to tropical ulcers and intestinal parasites. We screen for Malaria, HIV and TB.

We found one fourteen year old girl with TB symptoms but she had no money to get to the clinic for the three early morning sputum tests. I hired a man to pick her up every day for $3.00 US a trip. She is positive and is receiving treatment.

The following pictures might be disturbing but these are just a few of the very interesting cases we found in the villages.

This baby had scabies everywhere including the scalp. One treatment with Permethrin cream improved the baby dramatically by the next visit three weeks later so we treated it again.

This is Fernando who has a large bony tumor on his hip. It has been there over five years and is preventing him from working in the fields. This story may have a good ending as we are making arrangements for him to come back to the U.S. and have the tumor removed in Saginaw, MI. Synergy Medical of Saginaw is spearheading this project with True North. We will need donations to support this effort.  Click here to help Fernando.

We also found this woman with three large Tropical Ulcers that had eroded into the subcutaneous tissue. She had been going to a local medicine man for treatment. I convinced her to go to the nearest clinic for treatment and hired one of the locals to take her down river (over five miles away).

I am always struck by how difficult it is for these poor people to access medical care, a problem we sometimes solve with just a few dollars.

These three trips were wonderful and it seems that while I am still swimming upstream, the current is not as strong.

Best wishes to all of you.

Alan R. Barber, DDS
Chairman, True North Missions