In Fort Worth, Eye Doctors Train To Go Abroad To Treat Cataracts

In many developing nations, like Namibia, medical needs often outweigh capacity.

By Christopher Connelly April 28, 2016 9:30 am,

This story originally appeared on KERA News

Cataracts, the clouding of eye lenses, are the leading cause of curable blindness worldwide. They’re incredibly treatable, but for people who have lost their ability to see clearly, not being able to get the surgery can mean a life with no livelihood.

Last week, a handful of North Texas doctors spent time learning to help people with cataracts in the poorest parts of the world.

In a learning laboratory on the sprawling campus of eye care company Alcon in Fort Worth, a handful of doctors were learning to remove cataracts manually. It’s a technique that’s relatively uncommon in the U.S. these days.

Helena Ndume, in a bright room filled with state-of-the-art equipment, looked through a huge training microscope as one trainee cut into a pig’s eye. It was tacked to a piece of Styrofoam in the shape of a human face.

Ndume lives in Namibia, and the small incision cataract surgery method she’s teaching is kind of her stock and trade. It requires a tiny cut by hand to get at the lens that’s gone bad, and it isn’t always easy.

Ndume has performed more than 30,000 cataract surgeries in her country on the southwest coast of Africa. Cataracts are incredibly common – especially in older folks – and they’re super-fixable. But eye surgeons are needed to do them, and in many developing nations, like Namibia, medical needs often outweigh capacity.

“There are so many other diseases that have to be tackled too, like HIV and AIDS,” Ndume said. “And … things like diabetes and hypertension.”

So, in a lot of places, foreign doctors – including some from Texas – volunteer a week or two to help perform surgeries on medical missions.

Ndume operates eye camps in remote parts of Namibia, and she says Western doctors – folks like the ones she was teaching by cutting pigs’ eyes – need to know how to operate outside of the high-tech surgical theaters they’re used to.

“Most doctors, 95 percent of the operations they’ve done are with the machines,” said Daniel Gold, an ophthalmologist based in Palestine, Texas, who’s done medical missions all over the world. “They’re dependent on those machines.”

Read more from KERA News.