Daniel Annunziato, a first-year medical student at the Campbell University Jerry M. Wallace School of Medicine, paused often as he flipped through slides of a trip to the Dominican Republic in October. Annunziato, and the fellow students who made the trip, recently offered the show-and-tell-type presentation for faculty and staff.
As they recalled the experience and viewed the slides, they often stopped to talk about how the team set up clinics. About the oftentimes harsh conditions in which they worked. The heat and the dust. Students who also took the trip chimed in, with stories about reluctant and sometimes anxious patients, about relationships made.
About new friends and stronger bonds.
The conversations, though, always returned to their work. What they learned and their desire to return. To continue helping people. The Campbell team, including faculty and staff, as well as students, saw more than 600 adults and children while on the Caribbean island.
“It’s long days, but the students pour their hearts into working with the people and doing what they can to bring some comfort and care,” said Kristin Johnson, administrative director of Community and Global Health, who accompanied the students.
Annunziato of Massapequa, New York, and the group spent two clinic days in the villages outside Santo Domingo and two clinic days visiting communities in the underserved areas of the capital city.
The Campbell med students, with the help of attending physicians and mentors, provided all sorts of medical care and education.
They took vital signs, provided needed medicine, performed Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine, or OMM, which applies hands-on, physical contact to heal the body and correct elements of the musculoskeletal system.
The students also provided dozens of pairs of prescription eyeglasses, correcting problems for patients who had trouble with distance and reading.
“I think that was the most satisfying part of (the trip),” Annunziato said. “Because, you would have people come in complaining of constant headaches and the inability to see anything, and then you would fix their vision that quickly, and you could see the kids’ faces light up, even the adults, too. It was a big thing. Being able to give the gift of vision to somebody was pretty cool.”
Dr. Joe Cacioppo, chair of Community and Global Medicine and associate professor of emergency medicine at Campbell, talked about children whose vision was so poor that they failed to make out the big “E” at the top of an eye chart.
Annunziato flashed slides of the Campbell team performing OMM. He talked about breaking the “barrier,” evolving from student to clinician, even though, like most of the other Campbell students on the trip, he is just a few months into his first year of medical school.
“We were still able to make some remarkable progress on some of these people,” Annunziato said.
Dr. Thomas Motyka, chair and associate professor, OMM, offered guidance and help throughout the process.
“It was probably the second most satisfying thing,” Annunziato said of the OMM sessions. “Dr. Motyka also helped advance our knowledge with different techniques we could do, or just different variations of what we already learned. And it was nothing groundbreaking, but it was really good to build off of what we had already learned and … be able to use it.”
Annunziato and the students talked about the long, hot days. About how, in the Dominican Republic, aspiring physicians are required to complete six years of medical training, following high school.
“It’s kind of nice to see a different view of medicine outside of the U.S., working along with (local physicians and interpreters) and collaborating,” said Tori Kowalkowski, a first-year med student from Kingsford, Michigan.
The Dominican Republican was the most recent trip for the medical school. This summer, a Campbell team visited Ghana, in west Africa. In December, a team will travel to Guatemala. Medical school students also stayed busy this summer setting up clinics about once a month in local underserved areas. This includes places such as Siler City, Raleigh, Dunn, Goldsboro and Durham.
The med school regularly utilizes its mobile clinics throughout Harnett County and other rural areas throughout North Carolina.
Cacioppo praised the students for their dedication toward serving the underserved, in the Dominican Republic, North Carolina and throughout the world.
Helping students become true, altruistic physicians revolves around developing relationships, and importantly, relationships with patients, he said.
“You have to communicate eye to eye, hand on shoulder, that kind of communication that really makes the doctor a physician,” Cacioppo said.