An Interview With Dr. Thomas Vecchione
The Mercy Outreach Surgical Team (M.O.S.T.) at Scripps Mercy Hospital is dedicated to providing free medical and surgical care to needy children and adults in other nations. M.O.S.T. comprises physicians and other healthcare professionals who volunteer their time to help the indigent who are in need of life-enhancing surgeries. San Diego Physician sat down to speak with Dr. Thomas Vecchione about his work with M.O.S.T.
San Diego Physician: What gives you the most joy in your practice?
Dr. Thomas Vecchione: Right now, a cleft lip and palate, because those kids had no say in being born with a deformity like that. For these kids in Mexico, life is tough as it is, then you add that on top of it … it’s one thing after the other. This helps bring them back to a little more level playing field. Just as soon as the lip is repaired, the parents and everybody is overjoyed; that’s what really gives me the most pleasure.
SDP: How often do you go down to Mexico?
Dr. Vecchione: We go down twice a year. We go down in October for a week and then usually in March or April for a week. Last fall we went to Zamora and did 260 cases. The M.O.S.T. team now has done about 9,000 cases. We’ve gone down to Michoacan, Zacatecas, Oaxaca, Durango, Veracruz … we’ve done probably 37 missions in Mexico since 1988.
SDP: Do you only do cleft palates?
Dr. Vecchione: No, we do crossed eyes, hemangiomas. We have kids with extra fingers, extra toes. Burns are a big thing. There are a lot of kids who get burned down there because they have open pits and gasoline and kerosene. They have these scars on their faces that heal up but with a scar that pulls their head down, or their arms are kind of withered up. We do kids who are born with microtia, where one ear is not formed or where there’s nothing there at all.
SDP: What if a physician wants to get involved?
Dr. Vecchione: It’s got to be a plastic surgeon to do our group. You have to have a physician who’s a can-do person. In other words, you can’t have someone who says, “If I don’t have that piece of equipment, I can’t do it.” They’ve got to be able to go with the flow and to make do with what they’ve got under circumstances that are less than ideal. We’ve got a really good group of about four or five that go down with us most of the time.
SDP: You really enjoy it, don’t you?
Dr. Vecchione: This is the best part of medicine, where it’s just you and a patient. You’re not worried about an insurance company. You’re not worried about the logistics of making sure that the HMO is correct and all this other stuff. It’s just you helping the patient. And the patient doesn’t have to worry because they don’t have the coverage either. They don’t feel ashamed. They come down; they get it done, and that’s it.
Additional Organizations of Interest:
- Interplast: http://www.interplast.org
- Fresh Start: http://www.freshstart.org
- Operation Smile: http://www.operationsmile.org