Day 1

After a night of toss and turning in the bus, the whole cohort of America´s future doctors arrived at Trujillo. Tired, sleepy, but ready to start nonetheless.
And boy do we start right away!
First day of Think Global and I have learned more about NCDs than ever. Did you know that it is the social gradient that determine the level of health of an individual? Apparently a country´s GDP has little effect on health. Which means that a person at the bottom of the social gradient in Canada would experience similar challenges in health as their homologue in a less developed country. This made me think of the poor state of health in Canadian aboriginal communities. Marginized and isolated, people of these communities are really at the bottom of the social gradient. They suffer from high rate of CVD as well as malnutrition, substance abuse, etc.