Medicine in Afghanistan

It has been an interesting week in Afghanistan. The weather has turned and spring is here. Days are beautiful, about mid 70s, but still cool at night. Still need a fleece at night. Unfortunately, with the nicer weather, we have gotten busier, but still not too bad.



This is one of our kids injured last week with a grenade fragment. He is doing pretty well. Someone gave him the squirt gun and he was fearless with it. I can't show his face for security reasons.



I learned a few things about Afghanistan. One of our translators is a former Afghanistan physician. He left here in the 1980s and came to America eventually. He never licensed in the US, so he worked as a lab technician. He has been back in Afghanistan now for about 2 years translating for us. Interesting, since the war with Russia, the medical system has gone down hill. A good majority of the better trained doctors left. Their formal medical school is a joke. Training is poor at best. People who gained experienced as a medic in their military or other medical background, moved up the ranks to fill the void, so they became doctors and surgeons. Not many do any residency here. Therefore, there are really a lot of quack doctors here. They don’t have a medical board, so anyone who has the money can buy a degree. So when you go to a doctor here, you don’t know if he/she knows what they are doing or not. No wonder the average person here doesn’t trust the doctors. My daughter,Kristin, who is in 3rd year of medical school would be a full fledged doctor by now over here.

Most of the time we don’t operate on the local people unless it is the Afghan military or maybe a relative of a council man and we politically are trying to bring good will to this area. The other day our general surgeons operated on a local for a hernia. Supposedly, he had his hernia fixed before. When the surgeon got in there, he found all fresh tissue. If the patient had it fixed before, there should be a lot of scar tissue around. There was none. So whoever fixed him before, just made an incision and closed him up. They never touched the hernia. That was why it came back and we had to fix him. Imagine the field day that the lawyers would have back home.


We, the doctors, have offered to help out the locals, but it is difficult. The command won’t let us go off the base because it is too dangerous. The translator told me that the Taliban is kinder to the medical personal because they use them too. Whenever he leaves the base and comes back, he gets stopped by the Taliban and checked out. The Taliban still control a lot of the back roads in the mountains here. I am not so sure that the Taliban would give me the same courtesy.

We had to do sandbag duty this week. The bunkers are lined with sandbags and with time, they tend to slide down. So we formed a chain gang and restacked them and also added new ones. It wasn’t too bad. The good thing is that it is still a little early for those little critters to be hiding in the dirt or between the bags as we picked them up.



Can you guess which one is me?





We also have a Wii game here. We actually use it for true medical reasons. For our traumatic brain injured patients, often their coordination and thought process are slow. On the Wii game, they can do a baseline, then test them everyday until they are back to normal. This one tests their balance. I haven't hit normal on mine yet, so they are keeping me here for a while longer.


Tom