RxOH 2022 Alum: Julio Siliezar

Julio Siliezar

My name is Julio Siliezar, I am originally from El Salvador and immigrated to the US when I was 15 years old. I originally moved to Los Angeles but a year after moving to the US I moved to the San Francisco bay area with my mom and brother. I lived in the bay area for 16 years until I moved to Sacramento. I am currently a second year medical student at UC Davis School of Medicine and will be graduating from medical school in 2025. I am also the clinic manager for the Knights Landing One Health Center human clinic which provides healthcare to the farmworker community in Knights Landing, a rural community in northern California. I hope to pursue a career in surgery and the sub fields I currently enjoy in surgery are: cardiothoracic surgery and plastic surgery. Through my interest in cardiothoracic surgery I am involved in a research project looking at health disparities in access and outcomes of minimally invasive lobectomies (lung cancer surgery) in Northern California.

I came to learn about Rx One Health thanks to Dr. Michael Wilkes the director of global health at UC Davis School of Medicine. Through one of his many discussions he always emphasized the importance of not forgetting that as humans we are part of a larger ecosystem that not only includes people different from us but also animals, plants and the environment. I was also happy to see that Rx One Health was held in California, a state that has been my home for the past 16 years. I saw this as an opportunity to explore different communities and get to know the state, its people, and its diverse ecosystems a lot better and more in depth. I was also pleasantly surprised to learn how UC Davis is at the forefront of One Health around the world and how they are trying to integrate the different disciplines to more efficiently solve the problems we have in the modern world.

At the beginning of the course I was a little nervous because I had not been camping in a very long time or been in a very remote area for extended periods of time. This made me nervous, but everyone was extremely supportive and the community bond we were able to build during those two weeks made the camping and learning experience a lot easier. The other challenge I feel I had was trying to see things from different perspectives. In medical school I often feel we are extremely focused only on the human aspect of everything we do and we forget that there is an entire world full of life around us that makes our lives a lot more pleasant and full of beauty. Initially I felt that my lack of exposure to other disciplines would be a disadvantage in contributing to teamwork activities and in trying to solve some of the problems we were given throughout the program. I felt that I didn’t know well enough what the work of some of the other participants consisted of but as the days went through I was able to get to know them better and learn from their expertise and provide some insight from medical school into our activities.

There were many moments in Rx One Health that I learned many amazing things. If I had to pick a couple, these were when we practiced disease surveillance around Clover valley setting up traps for rodents, meeting the farmworkers in Salinas, and being able to see the milky way in the night sky in Clover Valley Ranch. I truly enjoyed learning about the importance of disease surveillance and how veterinary doctors are at the forefront of these initiatives. I think these are extremely important in this day and age as diseases are more easily spread through the world due globalization and the interconnectivity of the many supply chains that make our modern world possible. I think my favorite moment was when we went and set up traps for rodents all around Clover valley and had a real life sample of the immense work veterinarians do around the world. One key moment from that day was when Dr. Brian Bird took a little break and told us to appreciate the beauty of the place we were and how fortunate we were to be able to do this work in such a place. I also remember that he said how fortunate he is to travel around the world and do his job in many beautiful places around the world and work with different people.

The opportunity to meet farmworkers in Salinas was also an amazing opportunity to see the hard work this community does all around California and how the organization Alba farm provides training and skills to farmworkers so they can transition and become farmers, buy their own land, grow their own crops and sell them. This type of transformative work was very close to me as many of the people that work in this industry immigrated from Latin America searching for a better life in the USA, just the same way me and my family did 16 years ago when we left El Salvador.

Lastly, looking at the night sky full of stars and being able to see the Milky Way in Clover Valley was something I did not expect and is one of the most beautiful things I have seen in my life. I had not had this opportunity in the past and it was amazing to simply sit and look at those stars.

In my future career as an oncological surgeon I hope to be able to keep working in One Health initiatives. I know that surgeons are usually not that involved in community work; but human health, especially the disparities in cancer treatment and access to this treatment often affect our most rural and poorer communities in California. Cancer is not only dependent on the genes that we inherit from our parents but also in the environment that we grow up in. I hope to continue to be involved in research and collaborate with other disciplines such as veterinary doctors to find novel ways to minimize the impact of environmental hazards on cancer rates in our vulnerable communities across California.