Healing Hands in the Cambodian Jungle

by **keeping_it_riel** » Fri Aug 10, 2012 3:22 pm

Gabi Yetter reports from a remarkable rural health clinic. New front page story...

Sai Ya will never walk again.

The 26-year-old’s spinal cord was permanently damaged when she was pulled from the wreckage of a car last August and she now lies, paralysed from the waist down, at the Graphis Health Centre, with a newborn baby and no means to care for herself.

In the next bed, Chanthouern may never go home. He was admitted to GHC earlier this year after swallowing poison but the staff suspects he was poisoned by a family member so they’re reluctant to send the fearful young man back to the scene of the crime.

Across the room, sitting on a hospital cot, Ngy is being urged by a doctor to stay overnight so he can get the proper treatment for his thumb, which was severed when his pig tried to escape from the rope tangled around his hand. In his village, the local healer treated him by spitting on it and it’s now badly infected.

At GHC, doctors and nurses need to be more than doctors and nurses. They take on the roles of detectives, psychotherapists and cultural experts for their patients, who emerge from the jungle with a never-ending stream of tales and tragedies. And they never know what might be coming through their doors.

Now read on......

http://bit.ly/S6Dcb9

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by **Clutchen Menuts** » Fri Aug 10, 2012 6:37 pm

Good work. In fact, really good.

by **ken svay** » Fri Aug 10, 2012 7:34 pm

Poor fella my country,again.
What hope is there for poor khmers with under resourced rural clinics staffed by quacks who steal the real drugs and substitute them with fakes.
And then there is the ignorance of the patients who still believe in traditional mumbo jumbo and won't be convinced by any science.

by **Uncle Monty** » Fri Aug 10, 2012 8:52 pm

ken svay wrote:Poor fella my country,again.
What hope is there for poor khmers with under resourced rural clinics staffed by quacks who steal the real drugs and substitute them with fakes.
And then there is the ignorance of the patients who still believe in traditional mumbo jumbo and won't be convinced by any science.

As the quacks I've met who work in the countryside got posted there because they did not have the money to get posted elsewhere, and got shit wages. They never stole the vast majority of drugs as they were never sent in the first place, or they complained that the drugs they did get were out of date.

The problem is not the doctors, nurses, teachers etc who end up in rural areas. Work the rest out.

by **andyinasia** » Sat Aug 11, 2012 12:02 pm

Uncle Monty wrote:
ken svay wrote:Poor fella my country,again.
What hope is there for poor khmers with under resourced rural clinics staffed by quacks who steal the real drugs and substitute them with fakes.
And then there is the ignorance of the patients who still believe in traditional mumbo jumbo and won't be convinced by any science.

As the quacks I've met who work in the countryside got posted there because they did not have the money to get posted elsewhere, and got shit wages. They never stole the vast majority of drugs as they were never sent in the first place, or they complained that the drugs they did get were out of date.

The problem is not the doctors, nurses, teachers etc who end up in rural areas. Work the rest out.

Exactly. That's my limited experiential knowledge too.