MEDICO provides and promotes good health care in underserved, rural areas of Central America. First and foremost, this means sending clinical field teams to provide medical and dental care to people who have little or no access to basic healthcare. Throughout the year, our volunteer doctors, dentists, nurses, technicians, and lay volunteers travel to rural communities to set up and operate temporary field clinics.
For more than thirty years, MEDICO has been operating in rural, often remote, areas of Central America. Our original and still core mission is to provide and promote good health care. We have teams that teach community health and teams that build clinics. We have teams that help train local providers, but at the foundation of it all are the teams that travel to an area that has no health care, set up a temporary clinic and see all who come. Our teams see hundreds of people who may travel hours or even days for this chance to see a doctor or dentist.
Many of us who come from health care backgrounds remember that the reason we started down our road was to comfort the sick, to relieve pain. That’s what our teams do.
If you join one of our teams, you might well save a life now and again. However, the real work is the everyday practice of medicine and dentistry. Helping a mother whose child’s cough won’t go away. Treating an elderly woman whose back pain makes every day an ordeal. Seeing infections, trauma, chronic conditions. These are things you see in your office every day but here, in this world of poverty and isolation, your patients had no hope of being treated, being helped by a trained provider. You can change things. You will change lives. You might change your own.
