There are several terrific organizations that arrange trips all over the world to provide free musculoskeletal care to people who do not have ready (or even remote) access to quality healthcare.
One such non-profit organization is RESTORE WORLDWIDE, INC., which was founded 15 years ago by Dr. Michael K. Obeng, an award-winning Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, humanitarian, philanthropist, and global health strategist.
RESTORE WORLDWIDE provides free reconstructive surgeries and related medical services to children and adults with disfiguring deformities—whether present at birth or caused by accidents or diseases and involving head and neck region, trunk, breasts, extremities, and genitalia.
As part of its mission, RESTORE also educates and trains local medical professionals on the latest techniques and safety measures in plastic and reconstructive surgery, effecting change long after the RESTORE team leaves these communities.
Mission to Cameroon’s Capital, Yaoundé
Earlier this year, Dr. Obeng and his colleagues, including our friend and Los Angeles-based spine surgeon, Gil Tepper, M.D., completed their 24th mission (Dr. Tepper’s first). The team met with patients over the course of a week and carried out 315 vital medical operations, making this the largest mission for RESTORE.
It was RESTORE’s second humanitarian trip to Yaoundé, Cameroon, with its biggest-ever team of 40 healthcare personnel.
The mission trip was a collaborative effort between doctors from the United States, France, Germany, Senegal, Mali, and the United Kingdom, and was fully sponsored by a philanthropist and entrepreneur Eran Moas, founder of Avi Sivan Abraham Foundation (ASAF) Cameroon.
The team worked in two shifts (from 7am to 4am). Their patients were people who otherwise had limited or no access to medical help because of economic factors or the complex nature of their condition and lack of local expertise.
The team performed:
- Cleft lip and palate repair
- Craniofacial surgery
- Tumor resection and reconstruction
- Burn reconstruction
- Breast surgery including mastectomies and reconstruction
- Hand, foot & extremity surgery
- Excision and debulking of tumors
- Intersex surgery/gender re-affirmation surgery
- Spine/orthopedic surgery
- Urology/gynecology reconstruction
- Auditory diagnostics and care
This was Los Angeles-based surgeon, Gil Tepper’s, first time participating in such a mission trip.
“I was looking for a way to give something back, to do something new and out of my comfort zone,” said Dr. Tepper to OTW.
When Dr. Tepper was a resident, he circulated through the trauma department and learned how to “work with what you had and make the most of the equipment and resources at your disposal to solve the problem in front of you.”
Dr. Tepper knew Dr. Obeng already. They both have practices in the Los Angeles area and Dr. Tepper had assisted Dr. Obeng in reconstructive plastic surgery cases. Over the years Dr. Obeng had told Dr. Tepper stories of traveling to Africa to treat underprivileged patients and he explained that the mission needed surgeons with Dr. Tepper’s level of experience.
As many surgeons have related to OTW over the years. the notion of donating time and skill to help underprivileged patients, speaks to the very reasons most physicians choose this profession.
Dr. Tepper liked what he heard and, with his private practice on hiatus, he joined the RESTORE team for their ambitious trip to Cameroon.
In Country
In Yaoundé, Dr. Tepper teamed up with local Cameroonian neurosurgeon, Ben Djoubairou, M.D., who practices at the Yaoundé Military Hospital where RESTORE does most of their work.
Dr. Djoubairou began preparing for the RESTORE team two weeks before Dr Tepper arrived. He reviewed patient charts and diagnostic tests and X-rays. Over the ensuing week, Tepper and Dr. Djoubairou and local staff worked their way through simple spinal decompressions, to instrumented procedures, screws and rods, and wrapped up the week performing complex deformity correction cases.
“The waiting room at the hospital was always full, very crowded. I had to adjust to protocols unique to Cameroon and which we don’t have to use in the United States—even when it came to the weather. When it rains in Africa, it really RAINS,” recalls Tepper.
“We actually had to move our staff and patient to a different, less leaky room because of the rain.”
To be sure, the Yaoundé Military Hospital is a modern facility and quite up to date. The RESTORE team was an extra set of 80, well trained, experienced hands which blended for a week with the local staff.
“Patients came from many miles around Yaoundé. When local RESTORE organizers sent word out that an international team of top-notch surgeons and physicians was coming to town, patients came, many from very long distances.”
The arriving patients, Dr. Tepper told OTW, waited in hallways, stairwells and even lined up outside the hospital wrapping around the building. Many waited hours to hear their name called—after which they were evaluated and placed in the diagnostic and treatment queue.
Dr. Tepper found that, like all physicians who volunteer in programs like RESTORE, the range of cases was extraordinary. One patient might need plastic surgery, the next bone grafting, then a spine decompression case, the end the day with a maxillofacial case.
“What was interesting for me was the fact that I was able to participate in other surgeries with other specialists between my spine cases,” he said. These cases included ones where he harvested iliac bone graft, performed hand surgeries with a plastic surgeon or a deformity correction with a foot and ankle surgeon, remembers Tepper.
Out of Your Comfort Zone
Tepper was in a new environment with its own unique set of rules—which he needed to adapt to, not the other way around.
Sharing ideas and techniques was fine, but, he was also there to learn, not instruct. “It’s a time to check your ego at the door and, as long as we are safe, and pick the proper patients we’ll be ok. It takes creativity, flexibility to get the work done,” recalls Tepper. “If there is an instrument you would like to have and it’s not available, you need to use what you have in front of you.”
And being out of his Los Angeles comfort zone was one of the aspects of the mission he liked best. “The fact that you are doing these cases with what you have and making a difference in these patients’ lives makes you wonder if all the options we have in our lives are really necessary?”
It’s Not About You, It’s About the Work
The entire RESTORE team are volunteers. They get on the planes, bring whatever they can in terms of supplies, skill, and experience and then, not knowing precisely what they will be confronting in terms of patients and infrastructure, dive in. Go to work. Hour after hour, day after day, a mere member of a multi-cultural team.
Want to participate in a similar program?
We hope you will.
Dr. Tepper has a couple suggestions.
- First, find a partner surgeon who is already there or has experience in the hospital you will be going to. Together you can review patient records and pre-plan not only your surgeries but also the surgical/clinic schedule.
- Be resourceful.
- Harken back to your training when you were a resident and had to make do with what you had.
Already Dr. Tepper is planning his next mission—this time to Ghana in November. The lessons he learned from the RESTORE mission to Cameroon, he plans to apply to his trip to Ghana—specifically, spend more time with the local staff, learn their protocols for reviewing patient records and pre-screening. Doing that, he believes, will give him a better idea of where in the mission the patients fit. For example, could this patient be treated in the clinic alone or do they need to be taken to surgery as soon as possible? If they need a surgical intervention, what implants/instruments are required?
For the Ghana mission, industry will be helping more with equipment. Additionally, Tepper plans to ship what he needs directly to the hospital. This has its own logistical hurdles to clear, but it will make a huge difference in his travel plans and allow him to treat more patients.
Tepper also recruited another spine surgeon to accompany him.
“RESTORE”, incidentally, stands for:
Restoring
Emotional
Stability
Through
Outstanding
Reconstructive
Efforts
For more information, including volunteering yourself, here is a website: https://www.restoreworldwide.org/
