One could see from across the room that the patients had cataracts. And Bangladesh has a backlog of 50,000 to 100,000 people, all waiting for surgery, operations that most of them will never receive. Goins spent the first week of March in Dhaka, Bangladesh, reducing that number only slightly but training the local physicians in the latest procedures in corneal and refractive disease. He went as part of a mission led by Orbis, a philanthropic organization devoted to eliminating blindness all over the world. As one specialist teaches, another operates in alive setting or in a surgical wet lab with cadaver eyes.
Local physicians attend the lectures and watch the surgery on live video.
They can even quiz the surgeon over an audiovisual system that connects the lecture hall to the operating room. I examined 70 patients with specific corneal and refractive diseases and picked 10 of them, usually children or adults with vision loss in both eyes. We were able to help all 10 patients, but that meant there were many that we didn't have time for, and many more that we never had a chance to examine. She lost both hands and sight in both eyes due to corneal scarring cataracts. He performed a cornea transplant and cataract surgery with intraocular lens implantation to restore sight in one eye.