A review of gastrointestinal protocols for primary care medical service trips (MSTs) in Latin America and the Caribbean
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Gastrointestinal disorders are among the most common conditions encountered on short-term, primary care medical service trips (MSTs) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), but their optimal management remains unclear. There have been no previous attempts to describe the protocols that Western volunteer clinicians use in managing these patients. Methods: A systematic web search was used to identify organizations operating MSTs in LAC. Clinical protocols were downloaded from organizational websites, and organizations were contacted online to obtain those that were not publicly available. Protocols were analysed qualitatively, and content compared with existing international guidelines. Results: Two hundred and twenty-five organizations were identified and contacted to obtain their clinical protocols, and the content of each protocol was qualitatively analysed. Twenty protocols were obtained, of which 75% (15/20) discussed dyspepsia, 65% (13/20) discussed parasites and 60% (12/20) discussed diarrhoea. The protocols infrequently included literature citations. Conclusion: Gastrointestinal disorder protocols used by MSTs in LAC sometimes neglected important aspects of clinical management that are emphasized in international guidelines. This study is a first step in context-specific clinical guideline development for MSTs operating in LAC.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".