Pictured: Molokaʻi teens pose as a group at the first-ever Teen Health Camp held on Molokaʻi.
Teen Health Camp Molokaʻi made its debut on the Friendly Isle on Saturday, February 17, 2018, bringing together 51 eager teens, medical students and health career volunteers and a trunk full of faux arms to be sewn up or put back together in demonstrations highlighting both Western and Traditional Native Hawaiian medicine.
Activities were based at the Molokaʻi Education Center in Kaunakakai, which is operated by the University of Hawaiʻi Maui College. In seven different workshops, the teens got to feel what it might be like to work in a health care field. They learned how to stitch up a simulated wound on the faux limbs, which resembled the arms of store window models, with padding. The medical term for sewing skin together is suturing, the teens learned. In another workshop, they made, applied and removed casts to stabilize broken bones. There were two types of casts: the traditional plaster used in Western medicine, and one using a stiff layer from the trunk of a coconut tree, the way of ancient Native Hawaiian healers. The Lāʻau Lapaʻau (Native Hawaiian medicine) workshop featured local practitioners who spoke about the historical importance of Lāʻau Lapaʻau and discussed medicinal uses of Native Hawaiian plants.
The teens were paired with volunteer medical students from UH JABSOM to practice taking vital signs (recording temperature, weight, heartbeat, pulse and blood pressure) and to discuss nutrition and how infectious diseases spread.
