For 6 years he attended Lago Posadas, a town of 400 inhabitants. There she learned about the sacrificial life of rural peons. He emphasizes that for good attention, not only the biology of the consultant must be known, but also his biography, his life story.
Invisibles: Value and fame do not always coincide; even the most dedicated doctors are not the most visible. They value the thanks of those who need them more than a few minutes on television. They are part of their communities and are committed to them. They have nothing to sell; rather they share what they have, what they know. They serve humble families in remote locations, they do not want to leave any disease an orphan. They heal when they can and always take care. They are those who, with their feet in the mud, give meaning to an ancient profession. IntraMed wants to honor them with this cycle of interviews that aims to give visibility to the “Invisibles”.
Those who believe in fate or chance – or appeal to them to build a story – will not hesitate to say that the doctor Ariel Richards he was predestined to be a doctor and to practice in the south of Argentina. When he was asked as a teenager what career he wanted to follow, he answered “medicine” without thinking too much about it and without really knowing why. Years later, an accident led him to be a patient at a health post in the province of Santa Cruz, which years later he would be in charge of. It was the post in Lago Posadas, a small town of 400 inhabitants.
That office with minimal complexity was the only one for 200 kilometers around. Therefore, he also had to attend to Bajo Caracoles, an even smaller town where he went once every 15 days. Even with no veterinarians nearby, he had to treat a horse with a large wound and deliver a dog. “In those places where there is no other person who can take care of it, you have to be willing to do everything,” says Richards, who today is a doctor at El Calafate Hospital, but fondly remembers those 6 years in that remote place where he only It was reached by gravel roads, which allowed him to learn to do a lot with very little.
“I think it is important to talk about rural medicine, which is so discredited even among colleagues. And that hurts, because they are the true heroes of the medical profession, they work in very adverse circumstances and truly accompany the patient”, says Richards and acknowledges that after leaving Lago Posadas he was looking for his place in El Calafate: he went through offices and guards until reaching the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in times of COVID-19. Even in June 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, he went to Chaco as a volunteer to attend the Perrando de Resistencia Hospital at the peak of cases, when the head of Intensive Care, Dr. Miguel Duré had died after contracting COVID after intubating a patient. “The experience made me feel very useful and allowed my colleagues from Chaco who had been working for months and who had also had a strong emotional and psychological blow to rest. It was tough, but I’m grateful,” he says. And it is that Richards puts the emphasis on thanking each one of his experiences, both the chosen ones and the random ones, those that helped write his life story, both that of the doctor and that of the person. Here, his words.
From patient to doctor. I am from Mar del Plata and since there was no medical school there at that time, I left. I went to UBA, but I never liked Buenos Aires, I never really liked big cities. My idea was to go to other places, precisely to the South. The last year of my degree I had to do the annual rotating internship and I did it in Mar del Plata, at the Private Hospital of the Community. There I met a colleague, who told me: “They invited me on an exploration trip to the San Lorenzo area, in the province of Santa Cruz, which is a fairly inhospitable place, you arrive by special transport, they leave you on the edge of a river that you have to cross on foot with water up to your waist because there is no bridge”. And I said, “Very good.” Because I’ve always been attracted to these kinds of adventures. I went there in 1999 and the closest town was Lago Posadas. That’s where I met him for the first time, but we continued on our journey.
During my last year of college, I was having an existential crisis about whether I really wanted to do medicine, I didn’t know what specialty to pursue. I even started studying architecture when I was doing my internship. But after that trip I decided to stay in San Lorenzo. In one ranch they gave me a bed and food if I helped with fencing and improving the roads. There I was driving on horseback and during a tour, the animal slipped and fell. I also fell and broke my collarbone at about 4:00 p.m. I was alone and I walked an hour and a half to the ranch. I was lucky to arrive before 7:00 p.m., when we communicated by VHF radio with Bajo Caracoles, where there were people from the ranch to see how everything was going. We gave notice of what had happened to me, but it was almost night in late autumn and they could no longer come looking for me because they were 80 kilometers from the town. I stayed there all night, I did an immobilization myself and they gave me a painkiller. Until the next day they went to look for me from the Lago Posadas health post. An ambulance came but the river was too high and they couldn’t cross, so they had to go back to town to look for another bigger vehicle, a 4×4. fractured. There I was able to rest, they changed my bandage, I was treated by a doctor who is now my friend and they sent me to Perito Moreno, the closest town that has a hospital, where I can get an X-ray, tests and a cast.
I was hospitalized for a few days because I had nowhere to stay. There I met the director of the hospital, Dr. (Reynaldo) Bimbi, a doctor who arrived in Patagonia in 1951 and is now nearly 90 years old. He told me: “Richards, if you want, you can go back to Buenos Aires, take the exam, do the residency and then come to work with us.” I lived that experience as a newly graduated doctor and as a patient. I loved it and told myself “This is what I want to do”. I returned to Buenos Aires, I began to study for the residence exam and I signed up in the Province of Santa Cruz, to do General and Rural Medicine. That’s how I came to Rio Gallegos, where I did my residency for three years. And just a few months before finishing, the Lago Posadas doctor resigned from his position. So right away they let me know “the residency is over and you have a destination”. That’s how I came to Lago Posadas in 2003, this time as the doctor in charge.
We know the biology when the patient goes for a symptom or a sign and we also know the Biographylife story
Beyond the routine. Although we had morning and afternoon hours for outpatient visits, being the only doctor, he was available 24/7. He also lived in a house next to the health post and sometimes, after hours, he attended there. I also went home a lot and we went out to the rural area. There I met the sacrificed life of rural peons, in solitude, in very precarious conditions. It is very difficult to establish a relationship with these patients until a little trust is achieved. But over time we get to know the patients and the people. We know the biology when the patient goes for a symptom or a sign and we also know the Biography, the life story. I remember a doctor said to advance to “life history instead of clinical history”. It is characteristic of rural medicine to know not only the patient, but also the person. You have the time for that, to decipher the mystery of the human being by achieving a good bond.