Costa Rica: Tucurrique

I'm finally getting around to posting about what I did in Costa Rica!

For the first 3 days, we set up a free clinic in Tucurrique. We were staying at a hotel in Cartago (a town near the capital of San Jose) and Tucurrique was an hour drive from there. Every day we'd all load on the bus and drive over mountains and past waterfalls to get to this town far away from the big cities of Costa Rica. We set up treatment rooms in a school building and people from that area came to us with all kinds of musculoskeletal problems. A lot of people had low back pain, while a few had knee, hip, or elbow problems. One guy was recovering from a stroke and had not gotten any treatment until we got there!

The school where we set up clinic in Tucurrique

It was pretty overwhelming the first morning. We had set up different stations for patients to go to, but it didn't seem very organized. In the afternoon, we decided to treat in groups of 4 people. That worked a lot better since we could all collaborate and contribute in different ways. We made sure that each group had someone who spoke Spanish fairly well. We each saw one patient all the way through the treatment session instead of sending them to different stations. We got to make decisions like official PT's!

One of the patients we treated was this woman. She had been having a lot of knee and hip pain. We gave her a few instant ice packs, biofreeze gel, and some exercises to strengthen her muscles. Then we found out she walks to her daughter's house all the time and she only has a thin pair of sandals. So we gave her a pair of sneakers (some girls had brought their old shoes to donate.) She was so excited! She kept saying, "Thank you, thank you! So many gifts!"

There were a few patients that we weren't sure exactly what to do with. One guy came in with low back pain, but he kept giving us conflicting information on what was causing the pain and what made it better. We consulted with Luis, one of our translators/PT and he ended up just giving the guy some postural things to work on and some generic exercises. He told us later that he couldn't really find a diagnosis for that patient either.

This was a sweet woman we saw (picture below). She didn't actually have a musculoskeletal problem; she'd been having some stomach issues and she had mildly high blood pressure. Becca (far left), the nurse in our group, gave her information on changing her diet. I think this woman really just came in because she wanted a check-up; she really didn't have too much wrong with her. We checked her height and weight, did some manual muscle testing and ROM, and took her blood pressure because she wanted us to. She was so cute!

In our 3 days at Tucurrique, we saw about 50 patients. Some just need some exercises and some patient education, others could have used intensive therapy and I wish we could have seen them over several weeks. But we had to do what we could while we were there and leave it at that. Hopefully we made a difference in some small way in each of these patients' lives.