The Amazon Medical Project

So what did we do with all this support? Well, as mentioned above, we saw over 3,000 patients in 2010, 116 of them for medicines alone (over-the-counter meds such as ibuprofen and toothpaste that we purchase in the city and sell at cost, and occasional people to whom we give medicines which have been prescribed previously such as those with tuberculosis), and 2,945 for medical attention.

Among these, we numbered 329 visits for Family Planning, and vaccinated a total of 981 persons of all ages (many of them receiving more than one vaccine). We took care of 67 cases of trauma, eleven poisonous snakebites (up from 3 in each of the previous two years), a mere 9 cases of malaria, 72 people with pneumonia, 186 with skin ailments, 246 for diarrhea, and 133 for Well Child Care. Many patients had more than one diagnosis, such as women who came for family planning and also received a tetanus vaccine while at the clinic. Juvencio performed 45 dental extractions, and is now doing occasional teeth cleanings as well, and once in a while, a bit of restorative dentistry such as the repair he performed for Nurse Carmen when she chipped one of her front teeth. It was a pretty large chunk that she knocked off, but you would never know it to look at her now - the tooth is perfect. And we took care of 519 children in our Diarrhea/Pneumonia Program, which we initiated some years ago to offer very low cost care to children with any diarrheal or respiratory illness, since so many of these kids come in very sick and some of them die. We did not want to hear parents saying "oh, we did not bring her earlier because we have no money," when they are presenting us with a child on the verge of death from respiratory distress or dehydration.

And of course we saw a lot of patients who do not fit into any category, such as the man with tetanus whom I wrote about, or the women in labor, or the 14 year old young woman who came in a few days after giving birth, with an infected uterus. She recovered, unlike the tragic case of Juvencio's sister-in-law, a previously healthy 25-year-old mother of three who presented initially with fairly mild and unalarming symptoms, then worsened rapidly, went into respiratory failure, and, although we tried to get her to the hospital in Iquitos, died just as the boat pulled into the dock. (We will never know what she died of, since the family could not afford an autopsy and the government will not do one for free; but Doctora Yasmina is suspicious of leptospirosis, or she could even have been one of the first, unrecognized cases of dengue hemorrhagic fever, another tropical disease which visited Iquitos late last year and in early 2011.) Also, we coordinated care for several people who received cataract surgery from a visiting team of doctors in Iquitos. "Coordinating care" entails sending Edemita and Dr. Wilbert to actually take the patients from one line to another, helping them to get registered and pick up the necessary medicines, since many of the folks from the forest, especially the older ones, would not on their own even approach a group of visiting surgeons, let alone be able to handle follow-up care.

The bottom line is that we took care of around 3,000 patients for a total cost - medicines, supplies, clinic overhead, doctors, nurses, U.S. administration, everything - of a little under $70.00 per person. I look at the terrifying figure of $200,000 and wonder how we can possibly have arrived there; but then I look at what it costs for a doctor visit in the U.S., or even a simple prescription, and I say, hey, we're not doing so bad.