PROFESSIONRemembering Vietnam: 2 physicians' storiesNearly 800 doctors volunteered through an AMA program to care for Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War. Here are the memories of two of them.By Damon Adams, amednews staff. Dec. 26, 2005. From 1966 to 1973, the American Medical Association administered Volunteer Physicians for Vietnam, an effort that sent U.S. physicians to war-torn Vietnam to provide medical care to civilians. The U.S. Agency for International Development paid for the program, in which physicians volunteered to serve in Vietnamese hospitals for two-month stints. When the program ended, 774 physicians had taken part in 1,029 tours of service. The United States ended its involvement in the Vietnam War in 1975. To mark the 30th anniversary, American Medical News spoke with two physicians who participated in Volunteer Physicians for Vietnam. Here are their reflections on the experience, accompanied by excerpts from reports they filed with the AMA at the end of their tours three decades ago. In 1967, general surgeon William W. Funderburk, MD, spent two months in Danang, a city on the coast of the South China Sea. At a Danang hospital, he was in charge of the male surgical ward, which had about 60 beds and stretchers and 90 to 120 patients. About two in three surgeries at the hospital were for war-related injuries. The hospital conditions and diseases he encountered were quite different from those he experienced in Washington, D.C. "The environmental conditions that we had to work with, one had to be innovative when the lights went out. There were diseases that we just didn't see in the U.S.," Dr. Funderburk, 74, said in a phone interview from Washington, D.C., where he still practices as a general surgeon. "It gave me a different perspective and appreciation of the quality of medicine practiced in the United States." [...]Full text of American Medical News content is available to AMA members and paid subscribers.
Copyright 2005 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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