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Recent News of Veintec San Marcos
From Newstreamz San Marcos:
July 25, 2008
Ribbon Cutting Ceremony - Veintec-Varicose Vein Clinic, Laser & Med Spa
San Marcos, TX, July 24, 2008 - Ambassadors formally welcomed Veintec - Varicose Vein Clinic and Laser Med Spa to the Chamber of Commerce this past Thursday. Cutting the ribbon was Dr. James Schlotter — he was assisted by Michelle Davis, Nancy Banning, and Tanya Bailey, clinic employees. In addition to an array of advanced medical treatments, both invasive and non-invasive, the Veintec clinic also offers laser hair removal, Laser Genesis/collagen removal, customized facials and other skin rejuvenation services; they also carry a full line of skin care products. They are located at 1347 Thorpe Lane and can be reached by phone at 512-395-8770, or visit them on their Website at www.veintec.com. Please help us in welcoming Veintec to the San Marcos Chamber family.By ERIC BONAR
Communications Manager - Chamber of Commerce
Communications Manager - Chamber of Commerce
From San Marcos Daily Record
October 13, 2007
Medical Ministry
By Jeff Walker
Features Editor
By Jeff Walker
Features Editor
— It was a little after two in the morning when local nurse Michelle Davis and Dr. Jim Schlotter boarded a make-shift tour bus, heading from Quito, Ecuador to the town of Otavalo, about 60 kilometers away. Everything outside of the bus was too dark for them to see the mountainous terrain around them.Davis was nervous. She thought about many of the concerns people had warned her about back in the states: Tape worms, tubercolis, intestinal parasites, Colombians crossing the border. And the present traffic wasn’t helping.
Cars whizzed around curling two lane roads, passing one another around each curve at high speeds. Michelle and Schlotter resigned to just closing their eyes for much of the drive, arriving at the hotel an hour later.
By the time they were up early that next day, en route to the outlying villages populated by the native Quichua Indians, the two had a much better idea of the new world that awaited them.
“Everything made by God was breathtakingly beautiful. Everything made by man was somewhat unfinished,” Michelle said.
And that’s exactly what called the two to Ecuador in the first place.
Davis and Schlotter recently spent several days in Ecuadorian villages providing medical care to the indigenous Quichuas. Working with minimal supplies and unsure of what type of ailments they’d encounter, the two ventured into the trip a little uncertain.
But by the time they left, Schlotter and Davis were sure of one thing — they received more out of this trip than the work they put into it. When Schlotter talks about the people he met in the clinic, he speaks about people with a great amount of energy and a great amount of spirit.
“Just an incredible experience,” Schlotter said. “We didn’t go to Ecuador as tourists. We were really able to get involved with a number of people in a personal level.”
And what they found through these interactions, they say, is that the human spirit isn’t altered by development or progress or new schools or even a better education.
The Quichua’s vision is a lot like our own as Americans.
The trip to Ecuador was organized by several churches in San Antonio and surrounding areas, including First Christian in San Marcos. The Ecuadorian evangelical missionary group Fedice helped coordinate exactly where the teams would work.
The trip had three functions: A construction crew was helping to build a new church, another group provided vacation Bible school for the children, and nine others worked on the medical staff.
Several weeks before leaving for the trip, the medical team met to plan for supplies it might need and what possible scenarios they might encounter.
“It was an interesting challenge to anticipate those conditions that we might see, and then determine what we couldn’t treat. Obviously there were limitations,” Schlotter said.
The first government clinic they were assigned to exposed those limitations immediately. There were no medical supplies. Water was brought in by buckets. Most of their light came from windows — there was a lightbulb in every room, but it was very dim. The doctors and nurses worked with the cows and chickens walking by outside. Schlotter and his team brought their own distilled water, instruments for minor surgery and plastic cups filled with basic medications like Ibuprofen.
“There weren’t really any facilities. We didn’t have a hospital. We had a clinic that was very bare bones,” Schlotter said.
Dr. Belen, the young women who works in the clinic full time, was fascinated by Dr. Schlotter being able to perform minor surgeries. She hadn’t had the supplies to attempt it since she’d been there.
“One of the days we were there, Dr. Belen was taking care of a drunk that had cut open his head. She asked me ‘by the way do you have any Lidocaine?’ So I handed her some,” Michelle said. “She asked me if I had a syringe. Then she asked for a needle. And then suture to sew the skin back. She didn’t have one item of her own needed to sew that guy’s head back.”
And the demand was high. Dr. Belen was used to seeing 10 to 15 patients a day. In the 4.5 days that the group of Americans was there, they saw 500 patients.
But Schlotter, Davis and the others did everything they could.
They saw a lot of patients with back pain — mothers typically carry their children on their backs, the majority of people work in the fields and the most common injuries were people falling off of roofs. None of the roofs are enclosed, and because of the warm weather and lack of air conditioning, Ecuadorians spend many hours there a day.
The team also saw a lot of patients with intestinal parasites, as one of the biggest issues throughout the communities is a clean water supply.
But a lot of the problems were common.
“For the most part, the complaints were the same kind of thing a family doctor would get in San Marcos,” Schlotter said. “A lot of aches and pains, a lot of concerns about children’s health.
This happened again and again, he says. People would bring in small children, worried because they didn’t eat. Dr. Schlotter would take one look at the children, happy and smiling.
“One patient was a teenage girl whose mother was sure something was wrong because she didn’t ever eat dinner. Most Quichua women were about 4 feet tall, and this girl was over 5 feet tall — she was the tallest person in the county,” Schlotter said. “I looked at her and then told her mother, ‘I think she’s very healthy. I think she’s just a teenager.’”
Both Davis and Schlotter relied on two interpreters, young Quichua girls who spoke both Spanish and the native Quichua language. Michelle enjoyed their time together, and encouraged both of them to further their studies and dream big.
“Elijia, a 15-year-old who was the daughter of one of the village elders, was an immense help in the clinics,” Michelle said. “She had the potential to be whatever she wanted to be. She wants to be a school teacher... Really, their vision was to go back and help their community with educational pursuits.”
Which serves as a nice anecdote to what Schlotter loved the most about the trip: Seeing people — young and old — with desire and excitement and a vision for a better future.
“It’s a great reminder for Americans, not to see what these people didn’t have, but to see how happy they were. They had a belief in the future. They enjoyed their families. They were working to have more. They had a lot of hope. They had a lot of vision.”
And a spirit much like our own.