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First annual Faces of Tomorrow Charity Golf Tournament

What Hope Looks Like

KP surgeons start foundation to treat foreign children with facial deformities.

By Susan McDonough
03/21/08

When Dr. Brian Rubinstein travels to Ecuador next year with a team of medical volunteers to perform free surgeries for kids with facial deformities they will take everything they need to work with them right down to the last band-aid and suture.

It's a daunting amount of detail to organize from a distance of nearly 4,000 miles, especially with busy medical practices at home.

Cleft lip after surgery. Front page: Dr. Rubinstein with a patient, pre-surgery.

But when the bandages come off and a young man weeps at the new image reflected back at him in the mirror, his family and nurses crying along with him, all the effort becomes worth it.

"It's incredibly rewarding to help these kids who would otherwise go without surgery," said Dr. Rubinstein, a facial plastic surgeon and chief of pediatric head and neck surgery at Kaiser Permanente Sacramento.

His trip to the Latin American country in January will be his fifth.

International Relief Work Starts in Medical School

He first traveled to Ecuador in 2001 as a UC Davis medical resident with Operation Esperanza, a nonprofit that provides free facial surgeries to poor children in South America.

The group has since changed its focus?traveling now to Africa instead of Latin America and no longer including medical residents in the volunteer relief effort.

Dr. Rubinstein and a group of other physicians mostly friends and colleagues from UC Davis medical school who now work for Kaiser Permanente stepped in to continue the work in Ecuador.

Congenital conditions such as microtia, a congenital ear deformity, cleft lips, and cleft palate are twice as common in that country as in the United States.

Dr. Rubinstein said the children also face a harder time being accepted.

"It's much more of a problem there. The kids are shunned. They would never be able to grow up as normal kids."

Med School Friends Share Mission

Now called Faces of Tomorrow, the volunteer medical team includes surgeons, orthodontists, speech therapists, dentists, and other medical providers who will provide the comprehensive care U.S. children typically receive and that the complex medical conditions require.

The team will travel year after year to provide follow-up surgeries and care to their overseas patients, some who will travel from as far away as Colombia and the Amazon rainforest for the surgeries.

The Ecuadorian government relies on these volunteer missions to provide medical care to its predominately poor population, said Faces co-founder Nima Pahlavan, MD, an ear, nose, and throat doctor at KP Sacramento.

Two other KP surgeons are also involved, Charles Shih, MD, a facial plastic surgeon at the Oakland Medical Center, and Amir Rafii, MD, Head and Neck Surgery Department, KP San Francisco.

Preparing for Foundation's First Mission

The group hopes to raise $100,000 for the first mission in January. The money will enable them to perform as many as 60 surgeries while in Quito, Ecuador for 10 days.

Dr. Pahlavan said the January visit will be the first of many the surgeons make together.

They started the foundation with donations from friends and family but with grants and future fundraising plan to send volunteers more frequently and to expand the mission to other countries, he said.

They will start in Ecuador because many of them have been to the country before on these medical missions and have contacts and some familiarity with the country and its politics.

They found a hospital to use while in Quito that was started by a Catholic priest for exactly these types of medical missions, but the group must pay to use it and must provide all their own supplies, from the anesthesia to IVs.

Their patients supply the gratitude.

"Parents are so thankful," Dr. Rubinstein said. "We can make such a big difference. You bring the kids out of surgery and the parents are crying. It's really remarkable."

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