Lakeland Regional Doctor Travels To India For 3rd Time To Aid Poor

LAKELAND, FL — Lakeland Regional Health’s Dr. Laurence Brenner, board-certified and fellowship-trained in hand surgery, joined other doctors from around the country in January to provide life-changing care to patients in India who lack access to medical services.

This was Brenner’s third year making this trip.

“We were given the opportunity to develop careers and good lives through our practice. We have benefitted from the training. Since we can’t give someone our abilities, let’s use them for people who don’t have access to it,” Brenner said.

The India Project Inc. was founded in 1968 by Dr. Sharad Kumar Dicksheet, an eight-time Nobel Peace Prize-nominated plastic surgeon from New York City. Dicksheet has performed more than 100,000 eye surgeries and dermatologic procedures and nearly 100,000 cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries for children in India.

Dicksheet continued providing surgery to patients in India right up until his death in 2011.

Brenner visited the cities of Nagpur, Pune, New Delhi and Jodhpur in India, providing hundreds of kids and adults with no-cost plastic surgery procedures. His patients, who otherwise have no access to health care, lined the streets outside the clinic for screenings to determine their eligibility for surgery.

Depending on the surgery, each doctor can perform up to 10 procedures a day, he noted.

The communities he and his fellow providers worked in received assistance from local clinics, which donated anesthesia, allowed use of their operating rooms and provided the services of pre-op and post-op nurses.

Organizations like MAP International provided medicine and health supplies including 30 boxes of sutures and skin glue used by Brenner.

During his 12-day trip, Brenner performed surgery on cleft lips, burn scars, skin cancers, deformities, hands including fused or webbed fingers and drooping eyelids.

Brenner said participating in the India Project is as life-changing for him as it is for the patients he helps.

“We keep in touch with the local doctors after we return home. It’s amazing how you develop close relationships with them. While we are there, they bend over backward to help us and even send us letters and pictures about how patients are doing. It’s truly an amazing community," he said.