In the Loudest Clinics, Eko Helps Mission Team Hear What Matters

Dr. E.J. Stincer examines a patient with the Eko CORE 500™ Digital Stethoscope during a mission trip to Guatemala with his nonprofit organization

 

On a typical day, a mission clinic run by Dr. E.J. Stincer might see 350 patients, packed into a school where classrooms have been converted into exam rooms. 

Dozens of conversations are happening in multiple languages at once. Children cry while they wait for their turn. Volunteers move trunks of medicine from station to station. 

It's an environment where a clear heartbeat is nearly impossible to hear. Dr. Stincer, an internal medicine physician with 45 years of practice, and his wife, Holly, a registered nurse, run The Great Commission, a Christian nonprofit based in Martinez, Georgia.

Together, they've led 47 medical mission trips over more than three decades, and their most recent trip to Guatemala cared for 1,528 patients in a single week.

A calling that started with translation

The Stincers' first mission trip, back in 1993, started with a request for a translator. A local church was sending a plastic surgeon to Venezuela to teach cleft lip and palate repair, and Dr. Stincer, born in Cuba and fluent in Spanish, volunteered, and Holly and their young son came along. "Then it became a calling," she said.

Two years later, they led their first independent trip to Mexico, and they never really stopped. Since then, they've worked across Guatemala, where they return most years, sometimes to the same small towns again and again, along with the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Romania.

40 trunks, 30 translators, hundreds of exams

A typical mission trip travels with 40 to 50 trunks of supplies, eight or nine of them medicine alone, plus a team of 35 to 45 people, local providers, and roughly 30 volunteer translators.

Most patients come in with the kind of conditions that build up over a hard lifetime: uncontrolled diabetes and hypertension, and the arthritis and joint pain that come from years of carrying loads by hand or working fields.

Many are being seen by any kind of healthcare provider for the first time in years.

Alongside the medical care, there's a smaller ministry running in parallel, with puppet shows and small toys for the children.

The team also hands out thousands of pairs of donated eyeglasses to those in need, which Holly points out can instantly improve someone's ability to work in ways medicine alone often can't.

A stethoscope that finally gave out

When Dr. Stincer's hearing began to fade with age and he started struggling to hear patients clearly, Holly bought him an amplified stethoscope, which worked well for a long time. Eventually, though, it wore out, and Holly went looking for the next step up. Her research led her to the Eko CORE 500™ Digital Stethoscope, and she surprised her husband with it. This year's trip to Guatemala was the first time they brought it into the field.

“It got rid of a lot of the background noise, plus amplified patients' body sounds. It made a HUGE difference.”  

Dr. Stincer felt the difference right away. In a clinic where the noise had made even his old amplified stethoscope unreliable, that clarity meant he could pick up on heart rhythm abnormalities that in years past might have gone unheard entirely. He called the CORE 500™ "very useful" and "simply, a great product."

A rhythm strip becomes a teaching moment

On that same trip, Dr. Stincer had two students shadowing him, and the CORE 500™ turned into something he hadn't quite planned on — a teaching tool.

When he found a patient with an irregular heartbeat, he pulled up her rhythm strip on his phone and walked the students through it in real time.

One patient in particular stood out. She had Marfan syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that raises the risk of serious heart valve disease, and had spent years trying, unsuccessfully, to get properly evaluated. 

When Dr. Stincer picked up an arrhythmia during her exam, he finally had something concrete to hand her: both the evidence on the screen, and a clear reason to keep pushing for the specialist care she needed.

The trip they remember most

Ask the Stincers which trip they still think about, and the answer comes quickly: Haiti, in the days after the earthquake. Their team was among the first to arrive, flying into the Dominican Republic and busing across the border into a country still reeling from the disaster. They slept in tents in a church courtyard and, for the first time, found themselves treating trauma instead of the chronic conditions they usually see.

In the middle of that difficult week, a young mother went into labor early one morning, right there in the courtyard where the team was camped. Holly, who had trained in obstetrics years earlier, helped deliver the baby. Both mother and child came through it fine. While the Stincers haven’t returned to Haiti since, Holly still speaks about it gently, the way people do about the moments that changed something in them.

Passing the work forward

The Stincers know they won't be able to keep this pace forever, and it shapes how they think about the years ahead.

They bring students and younger clinicians along whenever they can, hoping to pass on not just clinical skill but the habit of showing up, year after year, for people who now recognize them by name.

For the Stincers, the right equipment was never about convenience.

It was about whether Dr. Stincer could actually hear what a patient's body was telling him, in a room with 50 other things competing for his attention. 

The CORE 500™ gave him that back at a point in his career when he could have simply stopped listening as closely. After 47 trips and thousands of patients, he hasn't. He's just hearing them more clearly now.

 

The Great Commission, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) Christian nonprofit based in Martinez, Georgia, supporting short-term medical and non-medical mission trips around the world. Learn more or support their work at thegreatcommissioninc.net.