In my first interview something that I found interesting that my mentor told me was how no matter what, we can't help everyone, and that it was important to just do everything that we could. At first, it made sense because the sheer number of sick and impoverished people in the world would make it seem impossible to aid them all, but in the during our last research check, I read an article that completely changed my mind in a more hopeful way. The article was based around this young doctor who took part on a program called operation Smile, which focussed on reconstructive surgery for those with cleft pallets.
After taking part in the program, this doctor realized that instead of shipping doctors from the states to the third world countries for only a few weeks out of the year, they could solve an exponentially larger amount of cases by simply training the native doctors how to do the cases themselves. After getting back to home, the doctor started dedicating all of his spare time to working out how he was going to organize his soon to be revolutionary idea, becoming so engrossed in it at one point that when his boss took notice of it and gave him the choice between his job and his passion, he happily walked out the door. With no other priorities, he created Smile Train, which incorporated his idea of training local doctors in third world countries how to perform the reconstructive surgery cases themselves.
One of the main obstacles was the quality of care, this doctor knew that in the beginning the mortality rates for these surgeries performed by training surgeons would be high, but after years of perfecting his teaching and program method, the quality of care increased. On operation smile, the program was lucky to go through 100 patients in 2 weeks, but with Smile Train, the company helped operate on over 250,000 patients last year alone, which was more than the total number of people born with cleft pallets in that year.
Another outstanding outcome was the cost of the surgeries, usually a single cleft pallet case would cost over a thousand dollars minimum, but through the abundance of doctors now trained to handle these cases on a day to day basis, they cut the cost to a tenth, ranging from 150-200 dollars. As i mentioned earlier the number of cases performed exceeded the number of patients being born afflicted with the disease, meaning that as of right now the company is handling the back log of patients with the disease, which potentially equates to the idea of being able to wipe out cleft pallets entirely, only dealing with the cases when patients are born with them.
In the end, I now believe thanks to this doctor that with the right method and passion, doctors can help everyone in the world, they just have to be willing to look past the money and focus on why they became doctors in the first place, to fix sick people. The final idea that stays projected in my mind that I only realized was applicable to the medical field due to this article was "Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll never go hungry".
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