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Santa Rosa eye surgeon will bring sight to the blind in Nepal
Dr. Gary Barth
CHRIS CHUNG / The Press DemocratPublished: Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 5:35 p.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 5:35 p.m.
Gary Barth is a Santa Rosa eye surgeon with restless feet and a serving heart.
Later this month he will travel to a forest in Nepal to see a fellow doctor who does almost unbelievable things for poor people hampered by serious vision problems and who wants Barth's help to do even more.
Barth will spend a few weeks at a rural hospital with Dr. Bidya Pant, treating an inestimable number of functionally blind Nepali Indians. Many are women who previously had no hope for help with their crippling impairment.
Barth will carry along donated human corneas and surgical equipment when he and his wife, Kevin White, travel to the beyond-bustling Geta Eye Hospital in southwestern Nepal.
Every day the hospital is inundated by hundreds of people, many of them from northern India, where advanced eye care is virtually non-existent.
“They just show up, and they camp out in the forest until they get their number called,” said Barth, an energetic man of 62 who has been living and practicing in Santa Rosa since 1983. He's on the staff at the Eye Care Institute and co-founded Eye Bank of Sonoma.
Barth said the Nepali hospital, whose benefactors include the Himalayan Cataract Project and Berkeley-based Seva Foundation, is intentionally located away from cities so that it doesn't attract people with routine eye problems. Its mission is to perform sight-restoring surgery on seriously impaired patients, most of them farmers unable pay for the service.
Nearly all of the people who trek to the Geta Eye Hospital come with cataracts that cloud the lenses of their eyes. The surgery involves removing the clouded natural lens and implanting a man-made lens.
Cataracts are the most common cause of vision impairment and blindness; the World Health Organization estimates that they blind 18 million people worldwide.
“A lot of the people, by the time they come to surgery, they can't see anything,” Barth said.
At the hospital in Nepal, Pant and a small staff of fellow surgeons have created a system so efficient that they are able to perform cataract surgery on as many as 500 patients per day.
Pant is regarded as the highest-volume cataract surgeon on Earth, often performing more than 200 surgeries in a day, and he once performed 312. Barth said that, in the U.S., the typical cataract surgery takes about 12 minutes. Pant “can do it in two and a half.”
Donors help to cover the cost of the surgery, which runs between $25 and $35.
Barth said Pant is a “preternaturally gifted” physician who was born with astounding neuromuscular ability and who sacrificed greatly to learn cataract surgery.
Pant was working as a surgical technician at Geta Hospital when one of the facility's founders, a Swedish ophthalmologist, observed the extraordinary precision and speed of his work and encouraged him to go to medical school.
Pant was 27, married and the father of three children. He left his family in Nepal and enrolled in a medical school he could afford — in Russia. He spent two years learning the language, then eight studying cataract surgery.
Barth said Pant and his staff at Geta Hospital serve up to 7,000 patients a month at the facility near Dhangadi. They also venture out to find and treat others, and they provide transportation to still more who are unable to get to the hospital on their own.
Barth said the outreach and transportation make all the difference to Indian and Nepali women who, for economic, cultural and other reasons, are far less able than men to make the trip.
“Women are disproportionately blind” in that part of the world, Barth said.
The Santa Rosa surgeon has traveled many times to India and other countries to train and to assist with cataract surgeries. A year ago, he was in Cambodia, a nation served by only nine resident eye surgeons.
He met Pant last October in Berkeley at the annual meeting of the Seva Foundation. The non-profit was created in 1978 by Larry Brilliant, a doctor and former director of Google's philanthropic arm, and co-founders that included spiritual teacher Ram Dass and Berkeley activist/Mendocino County kids' camp owner Wavy Gravy. The late Steve Jobs was an early backer of the Seva Foundation, and the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir serves on its advisory board.
When Barth met Pant, the Nepali was in the U.S. learning a new skill — corneal transplant surgery. Though Pant may perform hundreds of cataract surgeries a day, he also wanted to be of service to patients who come to Geta Hospital with damage to their corneas, often sustained in agricultural injuries.
Pant, a quick-study, came to the University of Utah Medical School last year to attend a six-week mini-fellowship in corneal surgery. Because he is not licensed to practice medicine in the United States, he could not perform surgery himself but could only observe.
Having traveled from Utah to the Bay Area to participate in the Seva Foundation meeting, Pant met Barth and was excited to learn that the Santa Rosan is is a corneal transplant specialist. Pant asked Barth if he would come to his hospital in Nepal and help him get ready to perform corneal surgeries. Barth told him he would be pleased to come.
Barth's primary task at the Geta Eye Hospital will be to assist and instruct Pant as he performs his first cornea transplants. Barth also is taking along eight corneas for transplant and some essential surgical equipment. He hopes to help Pant start filling a great need for eye banks to provide corneas for transplant.
“He thinks he might do 100 corneas next year, if he gets the system going,” Barth said.
Barth and his wife won't stay in a hotel near Pant's hospital, because there isn't one. He's excited that they will stay right in the hospital.
“We'll eat and sleep and get to know the people providing this service,” he said. Barth also is eager to spend more time with Pant.
“It's rare when you get a chance to be around somebody who inspires you like this guy,” he said.
The eye doc said and his wife could instead take a cruise, but “this gives back.”
Seva Foundation co-founder Wavy Gravy will host a sold-out benefit concert for Seva at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Sebastopol Community Center. David Nelson & Friends and Steve Kimock's regrouped Zero will perform. More information is available at seva.org.
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