Izzy Lieberman’s 15-Year Old Ugandan Spine Surgery Mission

Every year, for the last 15, Isador Liebermann, M.D., an award-winning fellowship trained orthopedic and spinal surgeon and clinical researcher based at the Texas Back Institute in Plano, Texas, packs up what he can, boards a plane and literally moves his practice to Mbarara, Uganda.

The first time Izzy (as he is called by his friends and colleagues) made the trip, in 2006, he was a busy 45-year old surgeon, with a very active clinical research program and dozens of research papers published and precious little time to leave his practice at the famous Cleveland Clinic.

And yet, enthusiastically, he put his American career on hold to travel half-way around the world into rural Uganda. “The 250-kilometer trip from the airport was life threatening. We had to navigate an all-gravel single-lane road that was often muddy and included animals and overcrowded buses.”

While difficult, he was in good hands and it was the start of something very special—the Uganda Charitable Spine Surgery Mission, part of Health Volunteers Overseas.

“That first mission, in 2006, was organized by Dr. Mark Kayanja, a Ugandan spine surgeon who was the driving force behind all of our work. While it’s true that I experienced a bit of anxiety when I stepped off the plane, I was confident in the knowledge that we had a plan, equipment, people, drivers, and patients who were ready for surgery. My primary concern was, ‘Am I going to be able to do what I set out to do?’ I didn’t want the expectations to be set so high that we would not be able care for people the way we wanted to. And of course, we were concerned about the possibility of complications.”

Getting Back to Basics by Leaving Your Comfort Zone

As is the case in most of the 3rd and 4th world countries, Dr. Lieberman’s patients in rural Uganda had disease and deformity patterns that are unlike those in most Western countries. The patients he saw, recalls Liebermann, presented with spinal pathologies that were predominantly congenital deformity, infectious spinal collapse (due to tuberculosis or Pott’s disease), and more recently industrial and farming trauma. “In Uganda most do not live long enough to develop the progressive degenerative spinal pathology we treat in North America.”

And yet, despite those complex cases, “The Ugandans, regardless of how severe their pathology is are amazingly appreciative of anything you can do, they have absolutely no sense of entitlement and will persevere regardless of pain and disability. I suspect this is because they all realize that there is no infrastructure to support them if they can’t find a way to care for themselves”