US-Based World Medical Relief Group Finds Charity Begins at Home

Abstract

DOCTORS of the World, an American-based volunteer organization that provides medical and humanitarian relief to desperate populations around the world, is now providing care in its own home town. Doctors of the World, based in New York, NY, was created with the assistance of the French group Medicins du Monde to help American medical professionals find ways to serve the world's neediest people. Since its founding in 1990, the organization has sent physicians and other medical professionals from the United States on missions to Somalia, Ethiopia, South Africa, Tanzania, Cambodia, Iranian Kurdistan, Kenya, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Russia, and the former Yugoslavia. In August 1992, Doctors of the World set up the first of several programs to provide medical services among drug addicts, political refugees, the homeless, and other disenfranchised populations in New York. These projects currently involve 14 volunteer physicians who are providing health care to drug addicts enrolled