External fixators — like the rig pictured at right — can work wonders for fractures.
But in post-earthquake Haiti, a fixator can also be a liability. A few days ago, a patient showed up at a field hospital near the Port-au-Prince airport with an advanced infection around the pin sites in a fixator in his leg. The leg had to be amputated at the knee.
The patient had received the fixator at another facility. Cases like that one are why the field hospital hasn’t been discharging its post-op patients with fixators, said David Pitcher, a University of Miami orthopedic surgeon who is working at the hospital.
“We’re not going to drop these people with external fixators and have them walking aroud Port-au-Prince with metal sticking out of them for three months — that metal gets infected,” Pitcher told us in a phone interview this afternoon. “We don’t see the possibility of saying, ‘Go home.’ To what home?”
There’s a trade-off, though: Keeping the post-op patients at the hospital means the doctors there can’t treat as many new patients. Ultimately, Pitcher said, they hope to set up a rehab facility that can be run by local staff.
More on health in Haiti: The WSJ describes the effort to rebuild an AIDS clinic that has been a central pillar in Haiti’s health-care system.
Photo: iStockphoto