Around 92,147 people live in San Angelo, Texas. Seventeen percent of them live below the poverty line.1 And many of those who live below the poverty line don’t have health insurance.
That’s why Dr. Pascual Mendoza, a family medicine doctor who works at the Shannon Clinic in San Angelo, decided to do something to help those in the community who couldn’t afford health care.
“Eight years ago,” Dr. Mendoza says, “I had the idea to try to give something back to the community — to those who are less fortunate. I saw so many people who were in need of help. And what better way than to offer my services for a day, for free. I asked my staff what they thought, and they were very receptive, and very enthusiastically agreed to help me with it.”
The idea soon snowballed. A local restaurant donated sandwiches for the volunteers. Another volunteer agreed to play Santa Claus and hand out donated gifts to the children. “Every year, we’ve had a great number of volunteers who have come and helped me for free,” he says. “I cannot tell you how satisfying it is to do something like this.”
Dr. Mendoza’s love for helping people is exactly what attracted him to medicine in the first place. “My mother had a tremendous influence on me and pushed me to pursue medical school. When you’re young, you think you can do many things to help others, and I thought medicine would give me many opportunities to help other people.”
Dr. Mendoza attended Universidad Autónoma medical school in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. When he immigrated to the United States, he took his licensing exam and completed four years of clinical residency at Mercy Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. After practicing medicine in Naperville, Illinois, for several years, he and his wife moved to San Angelo, Texas.
At the 2010 free-clinic event, which was held on December 12, Dr. Mendoza treated 54 people from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. Most had respiratory infections or other minor ailments. However, some of the patients had chronic conditions, like diabetes. In such cases, Dr. Mendoza helps the patients to start treatment and guides them to resources so they can continue to find affordable medicine and treatment. And for the patients he can’t help, he refers them to a specialist. For the 2010 event, an ophthalmologist and an orthopedic physician agreed to be “on call” during Dr. Mendoza’s free-clinic day, just in case they were needed.
One Christmas, he treated a woman who had diabetes and was very ill. “I was able to help her,” Dr. Mendoza recalls. “But as she was leaving, I found out she had two children — 4 and 5 years old. We were giving out Christmas gifts to the children, and they were so happy, because the family didn’t have any money at all. The kids came running up to me and were so excited, they were hugging each of my legs.”
Dr. Mendoza hopes other physicians will start free clinics in their areas. “I would say it’s not difficult to make the commitment to do volunteer work. What better way to do it than in the field in which we practice. It’s very easy for us as physicians to write a check or make donations to an organization and feel that we have contributed somehow. And that’s okay. But I think if you can do something on a personal basis, it’s so much more rewarding.”
1. City-data website. San Angelo, Texas page. Updated 2009. http://www.city-data.com/city/San-Angelo-Texas.html. Accessed January 18, 2011.