OMT on a Mission
by Josh Thompson
ACOM Chapter President
A group of seven medical students from the Alabama College of Osteopathic Medicine (ACOM) and ten students from Florida State University (FSU) joined four physicians on a medical mission trip to Jamaica in July of 2015. I, the author, was one of the ACOM students. The organization running the trip has been doing mission trips for two decades. The students usually work in intake, take vitals, and fill prescriptions while the volunteer physicians work with patient after patient for seven to nine hours daily for four days straight. The patients come from very humble circumstances and have very little or no access to healthcare or medicine.
The students of ACOM were excited to use osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) when indicated on the patients. The physicians were all MDs, and none of them were trained in manipulation. The doctor who runs the organization said that the work of intake, vitals, and pharmacy needed to be covered, and then if there was time, we might be able to treat. We figured that meant that we wouldn’t be treating much that week. However, I had the opportunity to treat one of the doctors who suffered from chronic back pain. I treated her the night before our first day working in a clinic. The next morning, she was shocked to find that her pain was gone. She was convinced that the treatment had worked, and starting day one, she began asking the ACOM students to treat patients that she felt would benefit from our skills.
With success stories from that day, we started day two, in which we saw even more patients. At this point, the other doctors began to recognize the benefit of having OMT-trained students on the trip. The other doctors began sending us patients on Wednesday and more success stories materialized. On Wednesday night, we offered to teach the physicians and the FSU students a few simple techniques. One of the physicians successfully treated someone that night. The student helping him issued him a challenge to try to use a technique on a patient the next day. He accepted.
I was working in the pharmacy on Thursday. At one point, I needed some clarification on a prescription that one of the doctors had written—the same doctor who had accepted the challenge. To my surprise, when I walked into his office he was in the middle of treating a patient with one of the
techniques that we had taught him the day before! The patient was so enthusiastic about the reduction of the pain in his shoulder that he began testing it out by punching rapidly in the air. The doctor and I were both very pleased at the result.
The impact of using OMT on this trip does not stop at the patient level. We had the opportunity to treat one of the healthcare authorities of Jamaica, who works closely with our humanitarian organization. The treatment reduced her knee pain, and she wondered if there might be a way for physicians of Jamaica to learn OMT. Another patient, after being treating for a frozen shoulder of a year’s duration and feeling exceptionally better, asked the student to write down some information; he wanted to take it to the Minister of Health and get doctors that had these skills into his country! One of the volunteer nurse practitioners in our group, who does research about post-viral arthritis, was amazed to hear that one of the students helped someone who had a post-viral trigger finger with a simple osteopathic technique, and she wanted to learn more. Our presence there also persuaded several of the FSU students that they wanted to apply to primarily osteopathic schools.
I feel very privileged to have been able to serve the good people of Jamaica. I feel blessed to learn osteopathic medicine at a great school with phenomenal teachers and students. This particular trip did not drastically change Jamaica, but we certainly made a difference in the lives of those who we treated. I plan to continue doing humanitarian service in this country and abroad, and to promote the learning and use of OMT in all stages of medical care. ❉
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