The highest form of love, teaches every major form of religion, is the unselfish giving of one’s fellow man to another. The healing arts flow from this sacred font. By giving, we receive.
When the demands of modern medicine weigh particularly heavily, many physicians make it a point to travel to a different place, a different culture, to work, for free, with donated equipment and in the most difficult conditions to simply heal as best they can.
When they do that, they experience something profound. They return home renewed and restored.
A team from Milwaukee recently returned from Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in the Americas where 80% of the population lives on less than $2 per day. They went to Nicaragua, a country where conditions vary considerably from the typical U.S. operating theater, where surgeons operate without reliable fluoroscopy, arthroscopy towers, or what would be considered necessary instruments and hardware in any U.S. hospital or clinic.
These physicians and their affiliated health care providers came from the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) and were led by Steven Grindel, M.D., MCW’s head of hand and upper extremity surgery.
In the Beginning
According to Dr. Grindel, the program was started by MCW’s former chair, Dr. Jeffrey Schwab. “More than 20 years ago Dr. Schwab connected with colleagues in Nicaragua who were focused on pediatric orthopedics. After hearing about their problems, he decided to take residents to several small towns in Nicaragua and do surgery.”
“Eight years ago, we began hearing from the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health that they needed people in their teaching hospital in Managua. So, we went there and set up a program for Nicaraguan residents and attendings to teach fracture care, infection treatment, and deformity correction. This culminated in the formation of ‘Milwaukee Orthopaedics Overseas,’ a group that travels to Nicaragua on a semiannual basis, bringing along at least one attending, resident or fellow. I am charged with providing instruction on hand to shoulder surgery to the Nicaraguan trainees.”
