I am traveling to the Siriraj Hospital for an 8 week global health experience in Bangkok, Thailand. I will be caring for patients on the general medicine & infectious disease wards, as well as gastroenterology clinics. I will also be completing a traditional medicine service to provide culturally competent care to rural populations. I will be working closely with Thai medical doctors, residents, and medical students to support their care of their patients. I foresee my presence making a difference by enabling me to lend my internal medicine training to the care of local patients.
Most importantly, I anticipate that my Thai patients will benefit from my work as I will be able to support their care alongside their Thai physicians. I can share what I have learned during my internal medicine training with Thai medical residents, and I plan to engage in teaching activities with the Thai medical students. I will also gain an important training experience and exposure to various pathologies more common in SE Asia (and less common here in the United States), as well as a different pattern of clinical practice. This will allow me to participate in a bilateral exchange of medical training and knowledge.
I am excited to work with the patient population in Bangkok as I will have exposure to disease states that I have not yet had the opportunity to see in my patients. Taking care of patients with TB, Dengue, chikungunya, and advanced HIV/AIDS will serve as valuable clinical experience for my internal medicine training.
I will carry forward the lessons I will learn during my global health experience to better care for my immigrant populations here in the United States. My work in Thailand will enable me to more fully understand how best to work with patients coming from cultural backgrounds different than my own. In this way, I anticipate an opportunity to continue advancing my capacity for providing culturally competent care to my patients. I am especially interested in serving Asian immigrant populations in my future career, so I foresee this global health experience being a foundational experience to my long term career.
Thank you for the opportunity to pursue this unrivaled experience. First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge the ways in which my Thai colleagues conferred on me their teaching and experience to contribute toward my medical training. I was able to gain experience working with patients with health conditions most common in SE Asia, including chronic hepatitis B and tuberculosis. This clinical exposure will assist me in taking care of patients with these conditions here in the United States. I also had the opportunity to attend a course on Thai Traditional Medicine, which gave me a new perspective on how other cultures approach disease management. I hope my experience will help be better relate to and ultimately take care of my immigrant patients here in the US.
The residents and medical students that I had the opportunity to work with were also impacted by my trip through a mutual exchange of information, especially when I attended teaching conferences. I was able to share how we approach management of conditions such as alcohol associated liver disease and IBD in the US, and we were able to compare the similarities and differences in practice patterns between the US and Thailand.
