Non-Medical Expertise the Post-High School

Non-Medical Expertise

The post-high school backpacking trip has become a cultural cliche. Many North American and European students take off on their first independent traveling experience when they finish grade school to expand horizons, meet new people, and encounter different environments and ways of life. Unshackled by obligations to school or parental curfews, the recent high school graduate can taste freedom as well as the anxiety of being financially self-sufficient.

My two friends and I chose Asia as our destination. Affordable on our tight budgets, Asia also offered tasty food, beaches, ancient cultures, and a completely exotic surrounds -- or so we thought. What we hadn't expected were the ways Asia had overcome some of its own cliches and especially in Southeast Asia, had developed an intriguingly futuristic mindset that contrasted with my expectations of backwardness. Sure, we took rickety old buses down miles of unpaved roads, through terraced rice paddies in Indonesia and Vietnam. Yet we encountered highways paved smoother than the ones at home too. Shopping malls in Bangkok loomed larger than even the sprawling suburban complexes in the United States and the maze of overpasses and thruways made the city seem like a scene out of Blade Runner.

We ate the street food our parents warned us against and -- please don't tell -- even drank the water here and there. Biting insects, and bigger inconveniences like lost luggage and tourist scams, failed to dampen our bug-eyed excitement.

As a medical school candidate, I paid close attention to health care services in Asian countries. Pharmacists serve more functions there than here and due to a multi-tiered drug classification system can administer some medications without a doctor's prescription. Fortunately I had no reason to see a doctor myself, but one of my traveling companions did, after he came down with a fever that may or may not be attributed to that occasional glass of tap water we drank.

In any case, the hospital he spent six hours in was indistinguishable from one in the United States except the staff was all Asian and the floors smelled of a different brand of detergent. Medical personnel served patients and visitors deftly; they were professional, attentive and knowledgeable and operated in a no-nonsense manner that I respected and hope to emulate as a practicing physician. The occasionally present language barrier posed few problems in the doctor-patient relationship while my friend recuperated in hospital.

Cultural differences in the medical experience can become issues for medical practitioners anywhere but especially in multicultural America. Doctors who treat patients from different backgrounds sometimes fail to accommodate for large extended families for visiting hours, for example, or doctors may resist accommodating for outmoded misogynistic cultural norms such as addressing the husband directly about the wife's medical decisions. Linguistic barriers can also impede a doctor's ability to properly treat a patient or offer the patient all the options available for treatment.