“And [God] gave
skill to human beings that he might be glorified in his marvelous works.”
Sirach 38: 6
“Down in Guatemala,” he told me, “I
had to be a real doctor, and it scared the heck out of me.” Now don’t get me wrong, according to the
standards of the American Medical Association and the licensing agencies of his
rather lucrative specialty, my parishioner was very much a real doctor. He had been in practice for decades and was
highly regarded in our community, sought out by people in need of surgery. But things were different, he was telling me,
when he went to Guatemala on a medical mission trip with his son’s church.
They were working in a remote area,
with very minimal equipment, you see.
There were no MRI machines and it was a day’s journey over rugged roads
for an x-ray. They could do simple blood
tests, and had a few diagnostic tools, and some basic medicines but that was
about it. My parishioner said he had
learned all about diagnosis back in medical school, but it was so much easier
just to run a test and be sure. Here in
Guatemala, he had to listen to the stories, mark just how people described
their symptoms. It was really
challenging work, and he wasn’t certain about a few of the cases he had
seen. There were some maladies he just
couldn’t treat.
Malpractice insurance companies, of
course, don’t tolerate this much guesswork here, and that’s probably a good
thing. But it was interesting to me that
my parishioner didn’t think of his work within these narrow limits as
useless. “A real doctor,” that’s what
he called himself, someone stretched to use all his ingenuity, to listen more
carefully, to treat the whole person and not just the symptoms. He left that time in Guatemala a bit wistful
about the more accurate and lucrative way he practiced medicine the rest of the
year, and anxious to get back again to a place where he really do justice to
his profession.
