10. Introducing Dr Naga Thein Hlaing.

I have met some pretty remarkable people in my visits to Myanmar over the last 28 years. One of my favourite finds is Dr Naga Thein Hlaing. He is a 75 year old practising surgeon who has developed his own surgical techniques to suit the remote, poor, and primitive area of Naga Hills that he was posted to in 1965-1971. He has continued to practise the same techniques since then so he has 40 years experience now as a surgeon. He is always telling me that a surgeon needs to have: the heart of a lion, eyes of an eagle, the hands of a lady, and the mouth of an angel. You should be able to guage a little of these qualities from the photos attached.

There are only a few simple tricks he has used to perform his surgery. The most important is that he uses local anaesthesia to operate on his patients. This means that his patients are conscious while he operates on them. He is able to perform all types of surgery except chest surgery and brain, using local nerve block techniques. The advantage of this is that he can operate single handed, the patient is not in any danger from the side affects of general anaesthetics. He can constantly monitor the patients status by talking to them which makes it easier to do goitre operations and not cut the nerves associated with voice box function. The patient is able to get up and walk out of the operating theatre at the end of the operation and eat immediately. They do not need to stay in a hospital, he can operate on people in their own homes or villages as long as the place is reasonably clean.

Where he worked in the Naga Hills there was no real hospital in our sense of the word and no supplies of blood. So he used a little lateral thought and developed a method where he sews before he cuts a blood vessel. A normal surgeon would cut a vessel first and then suture the ends of it. He sutures where the ends will be and then cuts. This means he doesn't have hardly any blood loss for the patient.

One of his last tricks is to give an antihistamine at the same time as he uses the local anaesthetic and this increases the time that the anaesthetic lasts by about 4 times.

He has used this type of surgery to become proficient in goiter operations which is his speciality. He has operated on thousands of goiters in both Naga Hills and also in other parts of Burma.

One of the things I like about him is his honesty and sincere regard for his patients. When he lived in Naga hills he developed a respect for them as people and even went around dressed as one of them sometimes. He travelled the area on foot from village to village for there were no roads there.

He has this wonderful collection of old photos from the region. Many of them are before and after shots of people he operated on and so are a bit gruesome. But they are real and valid record of the area. Oh did I forget to mention the Nagas are head hunters!

For this blog I have attached here a sample of the sort of photos he has in his collection.

I am making a document of his work and photos that I will be putting up on the web hopefully in the next few weeks. And I will put in a link to that then. At the moment I have put a document of pictures of one of his operations there. The link is:

http://www.thewheelofdhamma.com/naga/naga_thein_hlaing.pdf

Be warned the pictures show a real operation with a conscious patient! She is even sticking her tongue out in the few of them.
Remember tha although this is not what you are used to thinking about operations you go to the dentist and they do most of their work under local.
Just imagine your docter did the same it aint that hard if you have the heart of a lion...