Osteopathic medicine offered in the Caribbean

School to offer hands-on experience

The Edward Via Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine has embarked on a program in the Dominican Republic to promote its mission of “preparing osteopathic primary care physicians to serve the rural and medically underserved areas of the Commonwealth of Virginia, North Carolina and the Appalachian region and to provide scientific research that will improve the health of all humans.”

The program in the Dominican Republic is a joint venture between the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine, the Dominican Republic Ministry of Health, and the Punta Cana hospital where the students will be practicing. According to the College of Osteopathic Medicine’s website, the last two years of an aspiring doctor’s curriculum is spent, for the most part, in a hospital or clinical setting. The Dominican Republic program provides these students with some hands on experience for one or two month intervals.

H. Dean Sutphin, professor and assistant vice president for international outreach, said students are selected for this program, and to the college in general, by displaying “an interest in service to others.”

While at the Punta Cana hospital, the students will learn many skills that they will be able to use once they start their own practice. Some of these skills include gaining experience in regions where full medical services are not readily available and being able to check and operate on patients who speak a foreign language. Students in the Dominican Republic also have first hand contact with several respiratory and intestinal infections that they will see in different regions of North Carolina and the Appalachians. The training these students receive not only contributes to their understanding of medicine, but in a larger sense, promotes caring and compassion, Sutphin said.

“Our students will be changed forever by their experiences serving a poor and medically underserved region in the Dominican Republic; further instilling the virtues of compassionate and altruistic medical care. Those served in the future by these doctors in training, whether in the Appalachian regions or elsewhere, will be the beneficiaries of these skills and values,” Sutphin said.

Osteopathic care is form of medicine where the doctor focuses on the patient instead of the disease. In addition to prescribing medicines and performing check-ups, osteopathic doctors are also trained to perform surgery, and to take a person’s overall environment into account when healing an illness.

“(Osteopathic medicine) is a philosophy of maintaining relationships between body systems. (Osteopathic doctors) take into account heredity, environment, and even a person’s job when diagnosing and treating a problem,” said college spokesperson Bill King.