In the Denver area, Dr. Jamaluddin Moloo, right, co-founded a primary care clinic for refugees in 2012, called the Colorado Refugee Wellness Center.
“Try to keep it at a minimum,” Dr. Austin Baeth tells Misago, a refugee from Burundi who arrived in the U.S. five years ago.
“Children in the U.S. are becoming lazy,” he notes, warning that overweight kids tend to become overweight adults. Asian women around the table chime in, a woman from Burma occasionally translating.
“How about kids drinking soda or juice?” one mother asks, adding that she dilutes juice with water to reduce the sugar content. The others nodded.
Another woman says her mother couldn’t sleep at night because her legs felt as if they were burning. Possibly a sign of diabetes?
“It could be,” the young physician says, jotting down a message to the mother’s doctor.
Baeth, a second-year resident in internal medicine, is giving advice as part of a refugee health elective started recently at the University of Colorado Denver medical school.
