Partners COE Global Health symposium

Junzi Shi, MD

Resident in BWH Radiology Diagnostic

PGY-5

02/10/2020

Junzi Shi, MD working in a non-profit Hospital
in Ecuador as part of a Global Health Project.

The Partners COE global health symposium was an amazing and highly impactful one-day conference. Healthcare workers in global health work are incredibly exposed, often in resource poor areas of the world, and thrown into moral conundrums. Invited speaker Scott Allen gives hope with his inspiring talk and refreshing perspective. Physicians have the moral and ethical authority to stand up to compromising situations.

Although I am currently a radiology resident, my background in global health started in high school when I entered a national epidemiology contest. From there, my team-based projects took me to Nicaragua and Peru for biogas digester installations; Ecuador for comparative health systems analysis; Philippines for hydraulic ram pump and water transport systems. In each place, I worked with teams of passionate people but there were frustrations, set-backs, and failures too.

All my experiences were prior to getting my medical degree. In many situations I was frustrated that I wasn’t able to help people. The Philippines was particularly difficult as I integrated myself into the tiny isolated village in the mountains where people did not have shoes and never saw an airplane before in their lives. Stories of people not being able to get the medical care they needed were particularly frustrating; one girl had acute appendicitis and took grueling 3 day trip on the back of a water buffalo, followed by 1 day trip by cart, and then a taxi to the nearest hospital; by the time she arrived she was in septic shock and died shortly after. Another family did make it to the hospital, but were too poor to pay for the surgery and the hospital stay. The people asked, why can’t the government pay for roads and take care of us? They were extremely moved that my team came from the US to try to help them. I was extremely moved by the depth of their compassion and capacity for hard work. 

At the global health symposium, Scott Allen MD talked about his experiences working on the front lines in refugee camps and detention centers at the border. He asked questions like, “How should health professionals respond to the challenges they face working with families in detention centers?” He described being in scenarios in which preserving basic human dignity and health came into conflict with authority and power. The weight of his words hit me like a ton of bricks, and then uplifted me. I remembered helping victims of a rollover accident escape the burning car while I was a medical student in Cincinnati, Ohio. When I came upon a similar car crash in India outside of New Delhi, we called the police to get help but the local driver warned us not stop, or the police would likely charge us for causing the accident. Even if we are walking in the street, the casual pedestrian, we are always going to be physicians. That is the privilege and burden of our career. Sometimes we need to physically step in to help, sometimes we need to call for help, and sometimes we need to be whistleblowers of injustice.