And having interviewed a gazillion people who have done one week medical missions, the only thing the answer when you ask them what they got out of it was that they were really surprised how Stark the poverty was in developing countries.
Then the people you're interviewing are either sub-par intellectually in the area of perspective and self-reflection, or were participating in voluntourism. I gained far more than that from my international experiences than that, and I think that response is a cop-out answer.
I (and a lot of other Adcom members) don't care.
This is a pathetic response and if that is your attitude then you may want to consider other perspectives in this topic. Seriously, you're better than this.
Your clinical colleagues see it otherwise.
I wouldn't be so bold as to speak for all of my clinical colleagues, as many of them would disagree with you (depending on what the "procedure" is).
We have no way of knowing this.
With my personal experience, we did know this as our local guides and physicians told us this directly. One physician went so far as to say she would have never even considered going to those locations if our program wasn't paying her to do it. We do not know this for every location or specific locations, but to say we don't know if this is ever the case isn't true.
just to summarize, in case people aren't understanding this. We don't ding people for going on overseas medical missions. But we don't add points for it either.
I can respect that, especially given your statement about week long or short-term volunteering locally. To clarify my points, I'm not saying that these programs are the best way to provide help or that there aren't terrible programs that are truly vacations for a CV. I'm only stating that there are legitimate programs out there which do provide positive aid and relief to individuals who would otherwise not receive help at all, and to make blanket-statements which argue otherwise is either ignorant or dismissive.
I feel that you're coming from this on a very personal level rather than an objective one, which may explain your reliance on ad hominem attacks. Believe it or not, I am familiar with the need in other countries, but that doesn't change my perspective that pre-meds are the least useful people to be sending into these situations. Note that I don't knock MSF trips or the like; trained medical professionals have the potential to provide a lot of benefit. But college students/pre-meds don't provide any particular skillset.
There were no ad hominem attacks. If you think me pointing out that your view of "nothing positive comes out of these trips" is naive and narrow-minded, then I question your ability to interact appropriately during debates.
To the bolded: this is not something you could possibly know. For example, on the trip I went on over half of us were EMTs/Paramedics, so many had at least a foundational knowledge of first aid and how to take an initial evaluation. Also, consider that a specialized skillset is not necessarily needed to provide significant benefit to these communities. Part of the trip I attended involved public health outreach and education on preventing transmission of communicable diseases in rural locations that government officials simply did not go. To give you an idea of the lack of gov/institutional intervention, there was a village where numerous children had gonorrhea because a village elder was sexually abusing them while their parents worked in the fields. This was known to police in the nearest municipality, who did nothing about it and no officials had ever even come out to investigate. The advice of the physicians supervising our group was "pray" (in addition to antibiotics as a band-aid).
While we were not able to do anything about the STDs, we were able to educate this town about the importance of covering toilets and locations with feces/manure to prevent the transmission of communicable diseases, as well as the importance of keeping a clean water supply. Both of which were novel ideas to them and likely had a significant impact as Hep A seemed to be very common in that village.
Could this have been better accomplished by having a government agency involved or having regular workers go out? Of course, but that didn't and wasn't going to happen. That also does not mean that something positive was not gained by that village. This is a single example out of hundreds of ways these groups can have a positive impact, which is why I stated your previous views were narrow-minded and naive. Though if you're aware of how desperate the situation in some of these locations is, then I'd argue your statement was less about naivety and about lack of actual thought.
Let me give an analogy: we have parts of the US where funding for education is sorely lacking, qualified teachers are in short supply, and kids drop out of HS unable to read or do basic math; 32 million Americans are illiterate. So imagine a group of college-aged kids from Australia or Ireland show up for a week and offer tutoring in a community center to anyone who has not completed HS. They are accompanied by a qualified and highly experienced reading teacher. They work with folks one-on-one, hand out some donated books from their country (many are out of date or not a good fit with the new readers' needs), leave the students with some worksheets that they'll complete, if they are motivated, in a month or so, and then these volunteers will never be seen again. Maybe a new group will appear next year. Maybe there are different groups from different places visiting and volunteering such that there are several of these tutoring weeks per year each with a different group of volunteers and none knowing what past groups have done. Is this a way to benefit the community or is it better than nothing until the government gets its act together to deal with poorly performing public schools and millions of American adults who can't read? Who would be getting anything out of this?
If the children being taught how to read become more literate because of the volunteers, even if it's not as good as setting up actual, full-time programs there, then yes, they are getting benefit out of it. Does that mean that's the optimal approach? Of course not, but if this is the means available to improve their situation then I'd rather have that than nothing at all.
