A Physician's Year in Haiti

I have great admiration for people who volunteer their time to help those in need. Dr. Joe Bentivegna, an ophthalmologist who practices in Rocky Hill, has provided medical care to impoverished men, women and children in Haiti, one of the poorest countries on Earth. He wrote about his experiences there in a book called "The Neglected And Abused: A Physician's Year In Haiti," from which the following excerpt was selected:

Pills Don’t Help if the Patient Doesn’t Eat

Grangou nan vant pa dous.
Being hungry is not sweet. - Haitian Proverb

"Most of the disease I treated stemmed from malnutrition. Although I knew malnutrition was devastating, I never realized how this condition could permeate all aspects of life until I lived in Haiti.

"The malnourished Haitians had no energy. The few jobs available to them required the demanding manual labor of a pre-industrialized society: pulling trolleys full of heavy bags of charcoal, carrying water over miles of mountainous terrain, or plowing a field without a tractor or animal. This type of work requires a tremendous amount of energy; thus, lumberjacks eat more than accountants. No amount of will power can make a body that ingests a biscuit and sucks on sugar cane perform a decent day’s work. The problem was compounded by Haiti’s oppressive heat. I myself found it impossible to put in a good eighteen-hour day, a feat I performed easily as an intern in an air-conditioned hospital in the United States. Yet many outsiders construed the Haitians as being lazy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

"Malnutrition also robbed Haitians of their intelligence. Starving pregnant women deprived their unborn children of the proper nourishment for neurological development; thus these children were born mentally impaired and their continued starvation during the crucial months of infancy exacerbated their underdevelopment. During infancy, the brain grows rapidly, which is why children have proportionally larger heads than adults, an anatomical detail neglected by Renaissance artists. For every bout of severe malnutrition, a child loses ten intelligence quotient (IQ) points. Some visitors I met while in Haiti had adopted starving children from Third-World countries. Although they loved them; they all noted one thing - these children did poorly in school.

"The immune system functions poorly in the malnourished, not only rendering the Haitians more susceptible to disease, but also lengthening their recovery period. Frequently, I sutured the wounds of men who had engaged in machete fights over women. Often these wounds reopened because poor nutrition impaired the healing process. When I sutured the face of an American friend who cut his face during one of our barbaric softball games, it healed in a matter of days.

"The fear of hunger completely changes the human psyche. Haitians sold the medicine I gave them to purchase food. They saw little sense in taking medicine while starving to death. When the choice came between food versus medicine, food won.

"After what I saw, I was embarrassed that my country pays farmers not to grow food and purchases surpluses to maintain food price stability - while 500 miles from our shores human beings starve to death. However, I was to learn that starvation in Haiti is a complex problem that is not easily solved."

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Note: Joe Bentivegna, M.D., did his internship at Brown University and residency at New York Medical College. He is the author of two other books: "When to Refuse Treatment" and "The Lords of Greenwich," a novel. All three titles are available from amazon.com.

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