Most of the time we do these things in a school.And most of them are set up on a Friday,after the kids leave.6 or 8 hours later,we have the dental and vision and medical all set up.The local hosts have sent out fliers and been on the local radio and newspaper so that the public who need the service are aware of it.And they've got to be there early.Or chances are, your number will be too high and we won't be able to see you.

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Welcome back for the third installment of my interview with Remote Area Medical founder, Stan Brock. Can you walk us through a recent expedition, Stan, so the readers can get a feel for how it works?

It's not rocket science and, after doing 583 or 584 of these things, we've obviously got these things down pretty well. We get an invitation to go somewhere. We accept the invitation if we have room on the schedule. We start putting out an APB [All Points Bulletin] for medical volunteers and then when the appropriate time comes, which is usually a couple of months later, we load up all the trucks and tractor trailers, and in some cases, some of our donated aircraft and fly and drive off to the location.

Most of the time we do these things in a school. And most of them are set up on a Friday, after the kids leave the school. Six or eight hours later, we have all the dental and vision and medical all set up. The local hosts have sent out fliers and been on the local radio and newspaper so that the public who need the service are aware of it. And they've got to be there early.

People start arriving and lining up. If we're going to open the door on Saturday morning at 5:30, there'll be people lined up there at 3:30 or earlier the afternoon before. And then we hand out numbers throughout the night so, unfortunately, unless you get there very, very early in the morning long before opening time, chances are your number will be too high and we won't be able to see you.

So, they walk in the door then by numbers and we take a brief history of what they need and whether they're taking any kind of medication and we pass them off to a group, sometimes as many as 50 nurses, who do the vital signs, blood pressure, and so forth, which is very important if you're going to be pulling out teeth. And then they're escorted to the dental area or the vision area or the general medical area or all of the above. Because very often they want all of the services.

And then the treatment phase begins. And we also try to feed the patients too. Many of the patients have been standing out all night. They're hungry and a lot of them have problems with diabetes and low sugar. We try and provide snacks for the patients, and of course, also for the volunteers.

So how long is the typical day for a volunteer?

The day will go until 7 or 8 at night. And then we have to find accommodations for everybody, which has been done ahead of time by the host community. These doctors, who are coming from far and wide not only buy their own airline tickets, if they're coming to Tennessee, but they pay for their own hotel bills as well. So you know there are really good folks out there who are willing to help.

That's why they need to change the law so that these wonderful, willing practitioners of all the healing arts can go anywhere where they want to and provide this much needed care. A common remark from a doctor is "Gosh, I've been going to Guatemala. It's easier to go to Guatemala or West Africa to treat patients than it is to do in my own country." Except when they come to Tennessee and they say "Wow. Yeah. That's the way it should be, throughout the country."

Back to the volunteers. Do you get many repeaters?

Oh yeah, we get a lot of repeat volunteers. A typical weekend operation will use 3-400 volunteers and many are from the local area and are not medical. So, if we go back to that same place again, and very often we do, there will be similar faces. Last weekend, we had eight dentists who flew down here to Tennessee from Buffalo, New York. Kevin DeAngelo, a very fine dentist, is a regular with us. They had a couple of airplanes and eight of them came down. There are regular visitors to Tennessee. When we go outside of Tennessee, of course, they can't do it.

How frustrating! You have people who are willing to give the time and spend their own money to do it and you're all thwarted.

For 15 years, I've been getting requests from patients to hold one of these events in Washington, DC, the nation's capital, and permission has always been denied because of the licenses. But I was up there last week, and we have some volunteers in the District who are working on the problem for us, meeting as recently as yesterday with the dental board and, back in September, meeting with the board of medical examiners for physicians. We're hopeful that the health boards in the nation's capital are going to allow us to bring in additional helpers from outside the District from all over the country.

So, we are planning to hold a massive event in the nation's capital as soon as practical but the requirement is going to be to bring in people from outside the state as well as finding a suitable place to hold it - of large size. A big event like that takes about 40,000 square feet of floor space and it has to be donated which of course is another story.

How much do all these things cost? The highest costs for us are the fuel for all these trucks and donated aircraft when we use them and, of course, buying dental supplies and eyeglass lenses that we grind into the new eyeglasses that we make. So, there is considerable expense involved but what we don't need are the expense of renting buildings and paying for police and security personnel, but sometimes those charges confront us. It's the nature of the beast.

You bring up a good point - the actual dollars and cents required to run your programs. How do you come up with it?

Well, in the first place, we're a 501 (c) (3) charity so contributions to this organization are tax-deductible. And really the whole machine works on those generous donations from the public - the $10 and the $20 donations in support of what we do. And we get some foundation support, I'm happy to say. I wish we had corporate support;we've had some nice support periodically from FedEx, which is a Tennessee corporation.

But in large part, we do not have any corporate support. Obviously, we need an oil company in the worst way, given the amount of fuel that we're burning all the time. So the support of this organization is from the good-natured American public and those foundations that see fit to provide some support as well.

At the end of the fourth and final segment of our interview, we'll include links to your website, so people who want to read more, volunteer, and contribute, can do so easily. Do you anticipate a day anytime soon when your services will no longer be needed in the United States?

I would indeed hope so but I'm not too optimistic of that. The reform measures that are under considerable discussion in Washington, when they do come to some agreement and legislation is passed, which I hope will include allowing doctors to cross state lines but there seems to be some considerable doubt as to whether anybody is interested in that, other than us. What I'm hearing is that it's going to be three or four years before these reforms come on stream.

Then, there's the question of educating the public so that they know what's available to them and the very big question is: will it cover vision care, eyeglasses that is, and dental care for these people, or will it just cover primary health care? And if, for example, everyone is required to buy insurance, will they be required to pay premiums to get some of this specialty care like the dentistry and the vision? And so there are a lot of things to be considered here, it's going to be a number of years before we don't need to do what we're doing in this country and we can go back and concentrate on places like Haiti where desperation is just the order of the day.

In other countries that have universal health care, do they also cover dental and vision?

I'm not an expert, by any means, on any of the other countries, even though I'm from Britain. You know, in 1944, at the height of World War II, what we had in Britain was a coalition bipartisan government under Winston Churchill where making decisions was a whole lot simpler because of the bipartisan nature and the extreme desire and resolution to win World War II. But at that time, we had 49.7 million inhabitants of that island of which I was one, and there was a great problem with health care, given casualties from the war, etc. etc. So, the government mandated universal health care. That quest was addressed by Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, and it became the law of the land.

Now, interestingly enough, you fast forward 66 years to the present day, to the richest country in the world and one that is not engaged in World War II or III, and you have about the same number of people as existed in Britain during that terrible time, about another 47-49 million. So, can we find a solution to at least providing the care that those 40-odd million people need, given the fact that there are a lot of opposite interests in this country, not only in Washington, both sides of the House, but also business interests and so forth? This makes it, of course, much more difficult that a bipartisan, coalition government faced with World War II and perhaps where the arguments were less uncontrollable. How much this is all going to cost is way, way above my head.

Let's pause here. When we return, Stan will talk about how he keeps up the grueling pace, his prescription for improved national health, and RAM's recent run-in with Emergency Room billing. Stay tuned!

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Part one of my interview with Stan

Part two of my interview with Stan

RAM website

Authors Website: http://www.opednews.com/author/author79.html

Authors Bio:

Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of transparency and the ability to accurately check and authenticate the vote cast, these systems can alter election results and therefore are simply antithetical to democratic principles and functioning.



Since the pivotal 2004 Presidential election, Joan has come to see the connection between a broken election system, a dysfunctional, corporate media and a total lack of campaign finance reform. This has led her to enlarge the parameters of her writing to include interviews with whistle-blowers and articulate others who give a view quite different from that presented by the mainstream media. She also turns the spotlight on activists and ordinary folks who are striving to make a difference, to clean up and improve their corner of the world. By focusing on these intrepid individuals, she gives hope and inspiration to those who might otherwise be turned off and alienated. She also interviews people in the arts in all their variations - authors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, and artists. Why? The bottom line: without art and inspiration, we lose one of the best parts of ourselves. And we're all in this together. If Joan can keep even one of her fellow citizens going another day, she considers her job well done.


When Joan hit one million page views, OEN Managing Editor, Meryl Ann Butler interviewed her, turning interviewer briefly into interviewee. Read the interview here.

While the news is often quite depressing, Joan nevertheless strives to maintain her mantra: "Grab life now in an exuberant embrace!"


Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at Huffington Post, RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.