PHYSICIANS OUTREACH INTERNATIONAL

A project of the CENTER FOR NUTRACEUTICAL STUDIES

Physicians Outreach International (“POI”) is a project of the Center for Nutraceutical Studies, a nonprofit group dedicated to the prevention of certain preventable pre- and postnatal nutritionally deficiency and stress-induced diseases through education and the collaborative use of naturally occurring substances called nutraceuticals and traditional pharmaceuticals and vaccines.

POI is chartered to bring together the public and private sectors and professional medical communities to help physicians in foreign countries provide care, diagnosis and treatment to refugee and dislocated pregnant mothers and at-risk children suffering from developmental conditions brought on by stress, infections and insufficient diet resulting from poverty, war, famine and civil strife.

POI was first launched in the Summer of 2000, when the Medical University of South Carolina, Shelter for Life and 21st Century Nutraceuticals joined together to help establish a distance diagnosis network for the physicians in the Western Sahara refugee camps in the Sahara Desert. As part of this project, nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals, along with solar refrigeration units for the vaccines, are being provided to help reduce the sever incidence of syliac disease, a condition brought on by the lack of assimilatable vitamin D, affecting the mental and physical development of fetuses and young children.

A second project is currently underway in Tajikistan to rebuild doctors residences ravaged by civil war, and to rebuild and refit a hospital with equipment, refrigeration, nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals and communication equipment to help physicians care for the internally dislocated pregnant mothers and new borne babies. The philosophical centerpiece of POI is to create a dependable infrastructure around medical care and facilities, without which community rebuilding cannot happen. This is only possible if various partnerships are formed to provide dependable and needed support, equipment, structures, communications, medicines and nutritional supplements.

The technical centerpiece of the distance diagnosis effort are special ISDN satellite modems or equipment which allow the physicians to communicate with other physicians via the Internet by e-mail, scan and send x-rays, cardiograms and medical records, conduct live video conferencing for consultation and surgery and generally connect with the larger world body to request urgently needed supplies, funding and advice.

The Center encourages multi-partner projects, to which it contributes leverage challenge grants of funds and nutraceuticals in portions to be equally matched by the medical and NGO communities. Though precise matching is not absolutely required, what is required is a shared sense of obligation to help those least able to help themselves, and quickly without red-tape or bureaucracy to initiate new project sites which provide immediate care and support to the physicians desperate to help their at-risk patients.

POI projects are chartered to various established medical teaching institutions, hospitals and non-governmental institutions which have a sincere commitment to expand their teaching, outreach and humanitarian purpose to help these vulnerable populations.

Center for Nutraceutical Studies
7799 Leesburg Pike • Suite 900N • Falls Church, VA 22043
e-mail: info@centerns.org • voice: 1-866-ELLAGIC