Rancho El Petacal Health Clinic, Jalisco
It's checkup day for the kids of El Petacal, a tiny mountain village in central Mexico adjacent to Nutrilite's 1,500-acre organic farm. Since she arrived at the farm in 1996 to take a staff doctor position created by Nutrilite, Dr. Romo, 34, has been a fixture for children and adults alike. She has transformed the quality of life for the roughly 600 people she treats. There is no charge to treat Nutrilite staff members or their family members, and others may receive treatment for about $2 USD per visit.
In specific terms, Dr. Romo has brought myriad unheard-of benefits to the village, such as Pap smears, pregnancy checkups and delivery referrals, trauma care, childhood immunizations and dietary counseling. She takes an average of 200 appointments a month. Just as important, she has been a critical advocate for her patients, referring them to specialists in nearby cities. She also played a key role in fruitful efforts urging the regional government to install sewers and to extend ambulance service to the remote valley.
Nutrilite itself laid a water main, which connects to the houses in the village with hoses. Before the water line, village residents had to walk five hours to get domestic water. And children, who were usually responsible for bringing water to their families, weren't able to attend school. Better access to water and showers helped control one of the most serious health problems for the children of El Petacal: recurrent infestations of parasites. "These are problems that require you to treat the whole population – if you don't, the bugs come back," says Dr. Romo.
The opportunity to treat a "whole population," working in both public health and clinical care, is what lured Dr. Romo away from her city practice in the nearby city of Sayula to the Nutrilite post at El Petacal in 1996.
"It was an exciting opportunity to put together a clinic serving a community that had had no medical service whatsoever," said Dr. Romo. "I could equip it as I wanted and I was given the time I need to serve Nutrilite workers and their families as well as the larger community."
In her practice as El Petacal's only medical practitioner Dr. Romo sees an extraordinary range of cases, some in her office in the farm's hacienda, and some on house calls. A boy whose arm was severed in a car accident would have died if Dr. Romo hadn't been minutes away and able to stop his bleeding and stabilize him during a long car ride to the hospital. Then there's Esmeralda, a longtime Nutrilite worker whose cough turned out to be non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Dr. Romo referred her to a hospital in nearby Guzman City for initial treatment and has coordinated her care ever since, visiting her regularly in her home. And the clinic at Petacal has the only anti-venom treatment for rattle snake, coral snake, black widow spider, and scorpion in a hundred-mile radius.
Her newest campaign is to persuade the regional government and Red Cross to establish an emergency clinic at a valley crossroads so that other isolated villages in the valley will begin to have access to modern medicine that El Petacal enjoys. Her first bid fell short, but no one should underestimate the power of this determined doctor to serve those in need and bring about lasting change. Since 1996, she and Nutrilite have been partners, shining a bright light on the path to a better life.
