Many people think of Brazil as a very dangerous country – and it is, don’t get me wrong (though it’s not like you go there and get stabbed), but on my clinical practice there I could learn about and get to know so many different sides of this country.

My internship took part in July in the city of Manaus, aka „Paris of the Tropics”. It is a city located right in the middle of the Amazon rainforest and has a population of over 2 million people.  Even though the historical part has some nice buildings it is very far from being beautiful and there are a lot of really poor people and a few very rich ones. No favelas here, the poor live right next to the wealthy. Just stating these facts makes it self-explanatory why it can be called a very special place: it is isolated from everything, its people are mostly indogenous descendants and has a lot of history.

This special location also made my Neurology practice very unique: I could see things I could see almost nowhere else as neuroleprosy is almost just as common as neurotoxoplasmosis, neurotuberculosis or cryptococcosis. The local Tropical hospital is full of all kinds of tropical infectious diseases I have never seen before. Also, diseases that are mostly eradicated from Europe are common here like polio or rubeola.
The rainforest makes it really hard for many people to access the health care system – which is completely free in Brasil anyway (including the drugs) – often leading to very late stages of diseases, eg. I have seen a lot of people with tabes dorsalis, or a guy with Kleinfelter syndrome diagnosed at age 41. People who live in villages somewhere in the jungle often have to travel on a boat for weeks to be able to go to a hospital or to a GP at least, so it is often the local shaman who starts treating the sick and injured.

The Brazilian way of teaching medical students is also dramatically different: students from their 5th year on spend their last two years actually working in the hospital and they can and have to do everything like actual doctors. By the time they finish university they already have 2 years of working experience and while they may not know all the functions of microtubules they sure know how to treat people. Because of the language barrier I couldn’t join them in the everyday care like this, but I could examine a lot of patients, do lumbar punctures and other procedures I could never in Hungary.

But not only the hospital was interesting there. Everyone has heard that Brazilians are one of the friendliest people in the world: it is completely true. While most people didn’t speak English (not even among doctors!) everyone was as helpful and open and cheerful as one can be. After meeting for the first time they made me feel like we have always been friends and many people really became my friend over my short stay there. We went together for jungle tours, waterfalls, parties (and Brazilian parties ARE the best), flutuante (floating restaurant on the Rio Negro, where you can chill and swim in the river), we swam together with pink dolphins, visited the Meeting of Rivers (Rio Negro with Amazonas) and ate a lot. In this place people eat a lot of regional food: local fishes like tambaqui or pirarucu, local fruits like buriti, cupuacu or the famous acai, or things like takaká or x-caboquinho which I won’t even try to explain.

All in all this was the most interesting place I have ever been to, it was really cool and exciting that I could live there for a month and experience tons of things I could have never done otherwise. So unless you are really not into hugging others I really encourage everyone to choose Brazil because it is a huge and different and very interesting country with a lot to offer and really nice people.