It sometimes seems more fiction than science to believe that patients in the far reaches of rural western North Dakota could be treated by doctors in their hometowns without traveling miles and miles for care.
As a small town doc, nothing’s worse than seeing the taillights of your neighbor heading to the city to get a medical procedure done, when you know you could have performed that procedure in your local hospital. As rural health care facilities struggle to make ends meet, every patient who seeks care locally helps to keep the facility open. A few western North Dakota facilities decided to do something innovative to stop the patient exodus.
Enter the traveling trainers—Stephen Stripe, M.D. and Wade Talley, M.D. ‘95, both family medicine physicians and associate directors of the University of North Dakota Center for Family Medicine in Minot, ND.
Their “traveling endoscopy” brings vital health care services to the rural communities, along with valuable training for physicians to provide these services locally, ensuring convenience and quality service for rural patients.
Endoscopy means looking inside and typically refers to looking inside the body for medical reasons using an instrument called an endoscope, a thin, flexible, lighted tube with a camera on the end. Drs. Stripe and Talley travel to the medical facilities in Crosby, Stanley and Tioga about once per month to either perform endoscopies, or train the local physicians how to perform endoscopies themselves.
Why Endoscopy?
Drs. Stripe and Talley focus on two important types of endoscopies: colonoscopies, which examine the colon, and esophagogastroduodenoscopies, more commonly known as EGDs, which examine the esophagus, stomach and duodenum.
In an EGD, the endoscope is inserted through the mouth, down the throat, and helps in diagnosing and often treating ulcers, intestinal bleeding, heartburn and esophageal cancer. Colonoscopies assist physicians in discovering polyps, colitis, tumors, diverticulitis and hemorrhoids. With colorectal cancer being the third most common form of cancer in both men and women according to the American Cancer Society, colorectal cancer screenings are especially important. These screenings can result in the detection and removal of colorectal polyps before they turn into cancer.
