MedicalMissions.com Podcast

Planning and preparing for
a medical mission trip is an exciting process that should include a pre-trip visit with a health care provider that has a background in travel medicine. This session will discuss steps you can take to help ensure you stay healthy on your trip: receiving appropriate routine- and travel-specific vaccinations, general safety advice, following insect and food/beverage precau...

Traveling with children to distant lands for long-term mission assignments is rewarding and fun, but usually comes with some challenges. This session will discuss pre-trip health maintenance recommendations with regards to routine and travel-specific vaccinations and malaria prevention in children. In addition, there will be emphasis on safety measures to help prevent general injury and illness in...

Approximately 25% of the world’s population is infected with intestinal helminths. These neglected tropical diseases greatly impact the world’s least privileged and most vulnerable populations, especially children and those living in extreme poverty. We will review the global burden of these individual parasites, their life cycles, clinical presentations, and treatment.

Approximately 25% of the world’s population is infected with intestinal helminths. These neglected tropical diseases greatly impact the world’s least privileged and most vulnerable populations, especially children and those living in extreme poverty. We will review the global burden of these individual parasites, their life cycles, clinical presentations, and treatment.

Health for All by the Year 2000 was the goal of the Alma Ata Declaration in 1978. The authors, many of them Christians, hoped to achieve access to basic healthcare for all people using a community health development approach. Yet more than 30 years later the concept languishes. What have we learned during the past 30 years that might restore the goal?

The New Testament gives
not one but several models for doing missions. New Testament models of missions are far more flexible and less narrowly defined than the way we typically think of missions. The usual conception of a missionary as one who follows a “call” to go abroad is just one facet of missions. In this session we will explore the biblical patterns and trajectories of what it means to do...

This session will explore goals of intervention for children with cerebral palsy or spina bifida and how to accomplish this in a setting with limited resources. We will look at the basics of treatment, equipment options, seating and positioning, and bracing.

This session provides an introduction to the topic of domestic minor sex trafficking by addressing the legal definition of domestic minor sex trafficking, prevalence, typical scenarios, recruiting techniques, and current methods to sell the girls online. The information will include recent numbers from the Department of Justice on prosecutions around the country. Finally, tips on identifying victi...

Tropical travel is frequently associated with concerns about being bitten or stung. Although most of these injuries are minor, some can be dangerous or even life threatening. The worst offenders are reviewed and practical strategies offered for bite/sting prevention and treatment.

The course will deal with poverty in the urban slum. Attention will be given
to a biblical framework
for development and a strategy for doing “Kingdom Development.” Illustrations will come from lessons being learned in Nairobi, Kenya; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and Bangkok, Thailand.

Storying is a powerful way
to learn new ideas and pass them along to others. Stories impact lives and change behavior. Stories can be used for wholistic teaching, building physical and emotional health, and sharing biblical truths. Stories work effectively with people from all ages and all educational levels, and are a key strategy to work with oral learners. This session will illustrate the use o...

How can we use health promotion to more effectively prepare for disasters and to respond when they occur? During this session, participants will examine ways to use health promotion to deal with disasters. How can we be better prepared for disasters, reducing the risks, and, after a disaster, move on from relief to recovery and rebuilding? How can the local community be involved?

The Global Missions Health Conference attracts students and medical professionals from all over the United States who want to live out their faith through medicine but are not sure what that means for their lives. This session will provide a biblical framework for understanding our calling in light of God’s redemptive work in the world today.

When people in the developing world want someone to teach about health issues like
HIV, they look to medical people. Thus, whether you are going for a short- or long-term trip, you may well be asked, “Are you ready?” Unless you specialize in infectious disease, how much do you really know about the disease? What is your goal
in teaching? What do people really need to know? Perhaps the most importa...

Community Health Evangelism (CHE) is a breakthrough mission strategy that seamlessly integrates evangelism and discipleship with disease prevention and community-based development. Through these ministries people become followers of Jesus, churches are planted, and entire communities are lifted out
of cycles of poverty and disease. Terry Dalrymple
 has been instrumental in guiding the expansion of...

The recent research on HIV reported in the past year
has been characterized by leaders in the field as ‘game changing.’ There are new approaches to prevention
and treatment that have the potential for major changes
in the way the disease is approached. This breakout session will not only discuss these developments, but it will also be an opportunity for you to be involved in discussions about how...

Christian Community Health and Development organizers need to be thinking beyond the implementation of projects scattered here and there in targeted communities, to movements that sweep the whole country. There are keys to mobilizing medical volunteers and leveraging community. To achieve this, greater attention must be given to mobilizing volunteers who participate in their own development and wo...

The practice of pediatrics
in much of the developing world involves the care of children with malaria, often presenting in critical condition where prompt diagnosis and treatment can be life-saving and minimize morbidity. This session will discuss malaria in terms of presentation, diagnosis, treatment, complications, and prevention, in the context of the often less-than-optimal medical setting of...

Only a small minority of healthcare students who aspire to be missionaries actually serve long-term. One in five medical missionaries don’t stick with it for more than four years. There are daunting obstacles to going and to staying. Using both research data and the presenter’s experiences, this session will identify the best strategies for preparation that lead to long-term success.

Many creative access countries are among the poorest and most needy in the world, yet Christian witness is limited. Effective primary care is an essential component of all health systems. Locally trained Family Medicine specialists can provide excellent primary care in limited resource settings. With some constraints doctors from “the West” are welcome in creative access countries to develop resid...

Research provides a means of helping many people in many places over many years. And, it is possible to do useful research “on the field” in the midst of a busy clinical practice. This session will review possibilities and principles that lead to science-advancing, patient- helping, resource-affordable clinical research.

The session outlines resources of the biblical worldview and how they transformed the culture of Europe and the Near East in the first centuries after Christ, the culture of Great Britain in the 18th Century, and of South Korea in the 20th Century. The session describes what we, as Christian healthcare providers, must do to bring transformation to the peoples and cultures of Africa, Haiti, Latin A...

Nutritional deficiencies continue to plague many children in resource-limited areas. Current knowledge in the “developed” world is not always adequate in determining how to care
for affected children in “developing” countries,
and fresh research can be useful in helping children
all over the world. Using examples of studies of generalized malnutrition and of deficiencies of calcium, vitamin D, and...

This session addresses the difficult question: “If God
is good and wants us to be healthy, why do we get sick and die?” I tell the story of my wife who went “safely home” in spite of medicine, much prayer, and inner healing, and the new lessons about life and disease I have learned from this.