A week in Ecuador pushed University of Dayton students who aspire to be doctors, physician assistants and dentists to look past biological symptoms and see how culture defines healing.
The week-long international medical immersion trip, run through a partnership with the nonprofit Child Family Health International, placed students in public hospitals and dental clinics across the city of Quito, Ecuador.
Rather than performing procedures, the students focused on observation.
“This is intensive shadowing but in this cross-cultural type of context,” said Laurel Monnig, associate director of the UD PreHealth Resource Center and Premedical Programs, who led the immersion trip.
For the students, the immersion started before they even stepped foot in the clinics. Staying with local host families provided a firsthand look at Ecuador’s “familial culture.”
Olivia Upchurch, a senior honors pre-medicine major from Cleveland, said this warmth made a huge difference in their stay.
“They really went above and beyond and made us feel like we were part of the family,” Upchurch said.
This same sense of connection was visible in the clinics, where doctors often greeted patients with hugs and discussed their personal lives as part of their care.
However, being in a different country also meant facing high-stakes communication challenges.
Upchurch recalled a moment in a public emergency room when a patient fainted, leading to a confusing exchange with an ER doctor.
Because of a language barrier, a question about "drinking" led to a misunderstanding between drinking water and drinking alcohol.
For Upchurch, the episode, which was related to dehydration, illustrated how easily patient safety can be at risk when cultures collide.
To prepare for these moments, students took a one-credit hour pre-medicine course, MED 339: International Medical Experience, before departure.
Monnig, who has a doctoral degree in cultural anthropology, uses her background to teach students that medicine isn’t a culturally "neutral" institution.
“Medicine, healing, even what's going on with your body, it's culturally constructed,” Monnig said.
This preparation helped the group process what they saw when they traveled down the mountain to the Indigenous town of Otavalo.
In Otavalo, the group visited a traditional medicine clinic where ancestral practices like egg cleansing and guinea pig diagnosis are used alongside Western biomedicine.
Lena Ho, a junior pre-medicine major from Dayton, found the experience deeply connected across different cultures, viewing traditional medicine as an important aspect in understanding medicine.
“Learning how to utilize all of the incredible resources we have around us to make health care more accessible for all is vital,” Ho said.
Seeing these traditions allowed the students to practice “cultural relativism” by setting aside their own judgments to respect a different system of belief.
According to Monnig, these moments of discomfort are exactly what future health care providers need.
“You can’t think outside your cultural box until you go to another culture and then you are forced to,” she said.
By stepping out of their comfort zones, students developed "cultural humility," a key competency for treating diverse populations back in the United States.
Ho said the MED 339 course “allowed us to truly embrace our international medical experiences with an open mind and open heart.”
She said that despite the language differences, “I felt that humanity always communicates through the heart.”
