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SALT LAKE CITY -- A team of medical volunteers, mostly from Utah, is preparing for a trek to one of the most remote countries in the world. It's an annual effort doing what many experts thought was a bad idea: teaching an advanced form of high-tech surgery in a primitive economy.
Instead of staying in the hospital for four days and being out of work for six weeks, they can go home the same day, or the following day, be back to work within a week.
–Dr. Ray Price
It's so off-the-beaten-track, a lot of people probably couldn't find Mongolia on a map. By some accounts, the Asian country's economy is like the United States in the 1880s, and the people there are troubled by a very unusual medical problem.
Mongolia is a country that's beginning to modernize, but its nomadic culture survives.
"You fly in, and you land at the main airport, and there's, like, cows walking across the parking lot," says surgical technician Grant Sun.
Regional medical clinics are separated by hundreds of miles of what's laughingly called "the Mongolian Freeway."
"The Mongolian Freeway is nothing more than a bunch of paths, a bunch of roads, going in different directions," explains Patrick Christensen, bio-medical technician.
Yet, medical teams from the Utah-based Swanson Family Foundation are teaching Mongolian doctors to do laparoscopic surgery. They use highly advanced gear to probe inside the abdomen through tiny incisions. They do abdominal surgery by watching on TV monitors.
The Swanson Family Foundation has sent medical equipment and supplies, computers, and assorted equipment valued at over $14 million to upgrade the hospitals and clinics in Mongolia.
Salt Lake Dr. Ray Price is the foundation's medical director.
"We went over there and were asked to do this, and we had some real reservations about teaching, initially," Price says. "There are still some people that really don't think we should be doing this."
Because of Mongolia's remoteness -- sandwiched between China and Siberia -- just shipping the gear for each year's expedition is a challenge. The Utah team was asked to do it because of a special medical need.
"The Mongolians have an extremely high rate of gallbladder disease. They are a nomadic people, and they eat a lot of mutton and goats, and so they have a high rate of gallbladder disease," Price says.
Doing surgery the high-tech way is a big advantage in a primitive country: small incisions means far fewer infections and less disruption of a poor person's working life.
"Instead of staying in the hospital for four days and being out of work for six weeks, they can go home the same day, or the following day, be back to work within a week," Price said.
The team's goal is not to do a lot of surgery, but to teach so the practice continues.
Mongolian doctors are now setting up their own courses in laparoscopic surgery. Several companies and the Swanson Family Foundation contribute funds and equipment, but each year most of the volunteers pay their own way.
E-mail: jhollenhorst@ksl.com
