Dr. Mark McNicol, a middle grade specialty doctor from Northern Ireland, recently spent 9 months working for Medicines Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders. In an interview with Medical News Today, he explains that the stigma of disease and the suffering of sick people living in poverty made a significant impression on him while treating patients with tuberculosis in the Eurasian country of Georgia.
Dr. McNicol, who has a special interest in infectious diseases, found that working on a humanitarian project focusing on tuberculosis (TB) was rewarding and interesting, but challenging.
"One of the main risk factors for TB is poverty, so the patients we were seeing were usually quite ill and vulnerable," he told MNT. "Patients with TB typically have other diseases such as HIV or Hepatitis C, are people who abuse drugs, have problems with alcohol, are homeless, or have been in prison."
Dr. McNicol was working in a team with five local doctors of different ages and educational experiences, some of whom had trained under the old Soviet education system. He said that they were all able to share and learn from each other's experiences. "That was really good for my growth as a doctor," he said.
However, did his professional exposure to different people and ways of working have an impact on his personal development?
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