Hispanic Health Care

As a third-year medical student, I am involved in several international health programs in Mexico. I have been witness to preventable human suffering on both sides of the border. In Mexico, people are limited by circumstances of poor economic management and political corruption; on the U. S. side, our people are limited by different barriers; some are racial, language, education and economics.

The practice of medicine is an art that relies greatly on communication. Many non-Spanish-speaking physicians use word lists as verbal commands when treating Latino patients. At best, this form of treatment resembles veterinary medicine. As a child I had to serve as translator for my parents, and many times the physician treating them would scold one of them through me. This language and cultural insensitivity placed an unnecessary strain on the traditional parent-child relationship to facilitate the job of the doctor.

The lack of adequate medical care is of primary concern. The system is not designed to accommodate the increase in Spanish-speaking patients here in San Diego. I personally investigated the number of medical offices that claim to offer “Se Habla Espanol,” through the San Diego Medical Society. The results were very disheartening. Many times this claim meant that a receptionist or some other office worker spoke the language (usually with no medical training). Unfortunately, and to the embarrassment of many physicians I contacted, the employee often no longer worked there, in some cases for several years.

With the tremendous increase in population of our community, especially in the Southwestern United States, one would think that the medical profession would seek to serve this ethnic group as efficiently as possible. This could be easily done by hiring Chicano-Latino medical doctors with both language and cultural sensitivity into existing medical groups, or by learning the language themselves.

The medical profession cannot claim high quality, compassion and competence when a significant part of the population can’t be understood. I applaud the work of several Hispanic physicians, who recently organized the San Diego Chapter of the California Hispanic American Medical Assn. Maybe with an organization like this in town, their example might lead to a significant improvement in the quality and availability of Hispanic health care.

JACOB FLORES

La Jolla