Duty calls doctor overseas
For valley physician, the longest trip
is ahead
By PAT MURPHY
Express Staff Writer
For a physician whose work confines him to
a small community in the mountains of southcentral Idaho, Dr. Frank Batcha’s
medical practice in 2004 not only has gone wildly versatile, but global as well.
Dr. Frank Batcha, of the Hailey
Medical Clinic, examines a boy at a clinic in the small village of Bamboi in the
African Gold Coast country of Ghana.
In April, Batcha joined a Boise physician
friend and former classmate, Dr. Waj Nasser, for a 10-day working trip to the
small village of Bamboi in the African Gold Coast country of Ghana to treat
villagers for a variety of ailments and diseases rarely seen in modern U.S.
medical facilities.
Then, come November, the globe-girdling
Dr. Batcha will doff casual work attire he wears around the Hailey Medical
Center and St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center to become Army Maj. Frank Batcha
in camo gear and ship out for Iraq.
There, he’ll serve for one year in the
Idaho National Guard’s 145th Support Battalion of the 116th Cavalry Brigade
attached to the 42nd Division.
As a brigade surgeon in a forward
operating area, Batcha will treat everything from simple daily sick call
ailments of troops to being the initial contact physician for more seriously
wounded and injured personnel who will be evacuated to a larger medical unit in
a rear area.
So, in a year’s time, Batcha will have
traveled farther than your average hometown doctor--some 16,000 miles roundtrip
on the Ghana trip and some 14,000 miles roundtrip by the time he returns from
Iraq. He also will have applied his skills to American patients, to Africans
suffering diseases long ago conquered by U.S. medicine and to GIs in a combat
zone fighting terrorism.
To Batcha, all this is a learning
experience.
During his absence in Iraq, several
physician partners in the Hailey clinic will be available for Batcha’s patients.
Since returning in April from Ghana, which
he visited under the auspices of the Boise-based Small Village Foundation,
Batcha has been reflecting on the dramatic contrasts between his daily medical
duties in Hailey and an African village.
He and Nasser treated at least 100 persons
a day, Batcha said. The common complaint was back pain.
Back pain?
Women carry jugs of water on their heads
all day, he said. The weight must be at least 50 pounds. And men suffer from
back pain brought on by a stooping posture while using a short-handled hoe in
their farming.
"The soil is clay and hard," Batcha said.
"They (the patients) explained that the short handle is necessary to get a
firmer, stronger digging action, so they have to stoop."
With their arrival in the village, Batcha
said "it was like a circus—people who didn’t need any help turned up."
Batcha and Nasser brought along anti-venom
medication for deadly snakebites that are common in Ghana. They also treated
intestinal parasites, malaria and elephantiasis.
Wood River Valley pharmacies also "were
awfully generous," , Batcha said. Albertson’s, Chateau Drugs, Karen’s and The
Drug Store contributed two duffle bags filled with 10,000 doses of such
medications as Tylenol, ibuprofen and Amoxicillin.
Batcha said because the world is shrinking
and more people travel between countries, it is important for U.S. physicians to
be familiar with diseases that are endemic to places such as Africa so they can
be detected and diagnosed.
"Most physicians here just aren't familiar
with a lot of those conditions, and wouldn’t know" what a patient from, say,
Africa was suffering if he or she showed up in a U.S. hospital emergency room.
Batcha and Nasser were housed at a
Catholic mission, whose Polish priest provided a "refreshing" break from the
misery seen all day at the place where the physicians treated patients "after
goat dung was swept out."
The mission had its own well and a
generator for limited lightning.
"There wasn’t much to do, but talk,"
Batcha said.
Still, Batcha said, "it wasn’t enjoyable,
but absolutely enlightening."
The sponsor of the trip to Ghana, Small
Village Foundation, was founded by Jeannine Smith, of Boise, with the help of
her husband, Mark, a dentist. They have made a number of trips to Ghana, and
enlisted Nasser, her personal physician, and Batcha as a longtime friend of
Nasser.
If the current variety in Dr. Batcha’s
career seems adventurous, consider:
He began his career with a degree in
entomology, the study of insects, before studying to become a physician.