Investing in the Future: Dr. Woodson Visits Africa to Train Future ENT Specialists

Gayle E. Woodson, M.D., a board-certified otolaryngology specialist at The Ear, Nose, Throat and Plastic Surgery Associates comes from a long line of doctors. Since the 1600s, there has been at least one physician in every generation of Dr. Woodson’s family. Part of that lineage has, of course, been an innate desire to help people.

The Hippocratic Oath urges doctors to share their skills and knowledge with other students and physicians who share a passion for helping others. Dr. Woodson continually puts this tenet into action. Every year for the past decade, Dr. Woodson visits Africa, specifically the country of the United Republic of Tanzania, to volunteer at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center (KCMC), a referral hospital for more than 15 million people in northern Tanzania.

In 2017, Dr. Woodson and her husband spent the month of March in the vast mountainous country of almost 54 million inhabitants, teaching residents and medical students there how to treat ear, nose and throat issues they may see throughout their careers.

“When we first started going to Tanzania, there were only five ear, nose, and throat (ENT) doctors in the country,” says Dr. Woodson. “And they weren’t doing much more than tonsillectomy, adenoidectomy, and foreign body removal.”

With two ENT doctors at the KCMC about to retire, the contribution from Dr. Woodson and her husband became all the more significant. “Over the last few years we got a few students interested in becoming otolaryngologists,” she says with a smile. “Two doctors, one from Holland and another from the UK, have also started visiting the country to teach, and we have collaborated in training residents there.”

Many of Tanzania’s poorest citizens need to travel for hours over hundreds of miles to see a qualified ENT physician. They often put off the visit as most cannot afford the time and cost of travel. This distressing predicament results in many ENT conditions and diseases such as throat cancers, chronic tonsillitis, and ear disease reaching a far more advanced and alarming state than they would in more developed countries.

Under the supervision of Dr. Woodson and her team, three residents finished training and became ENT specialists in November 2014. Now those graduates teach the next generation of eight residents-in-training.

“The scope of practice has been expanded,” says Dr. Woodson. “We take care of cancer patients, do thyroidectomies, airway reconstruction, and advanced sinus and ear surgery.”

In addition to teaching, the team also brings equipment and supplies with each visit, including major equipment donations from the Karl Storz company.

Tanzania has not been the only country to benefit from Dr. Woodson’s pro-bono work. Between 1999 and 2007, she visited El Salvador on five occasions with a cleft palate team. Over the course of five visits to Jordan between 2004 and 2012, she taught head and neck surgery in a government hospital, and in January 2017, she performed primary care work in Guatemala.

“Giving back has always been something that’s extremely important to me,” she says. “I’m glad we can share what we know and play a part, however small, in helping countless people there receive the care they need to improve their quality of life.”